This has, without a shadow of a doubt, been the worst twelve months of my life to date.
In mid-October 2006 I was having trouble urinating and decided to visit my GP who, in turn, sent me for a PSA (Prostate Specific Antigen) Blood Test. This was returned with a figure of 130.
To place this in some sort of perspective, a normal reading is under 4. By the time it gets to 20 there is little to be done except treat it with whatever is required as it means that the cancer has been there long enough to have moved out of the Prostate and into surrounding tissue, possibly the bones.
When the reading came back, he also referred me to a urologist for further testing and treatment - the first appointment available was not until December 2, 2006. A full month-and-a-half later. Another PSA Test was also required and came back with the same reading as previously.
My old and dear friend Grant Watson who had been living and working in Paris for the past couple of years was home for a visit and drove up from Sydney specifically to take me to the appointment with the urologist.
Following the examination, an appointment was made for me to go and have a biopsy done at the day clinic in Orange on Wednesday - December 13, 2006 which was going to cost $200, an amount I would not have and which Grant very kindly handed to me immediately.
We went back home to Portland where the three of us (grant, Shirley and I) had dinner and a very pleasant evening listening to music and drinking the Scotch, wine and Gin that Grant had bought before we left Lithgow.
The next morning Grant drove back to Sydney as he had to return shortly thereafter to Paris to finish up his job before returning home to Australia permanently. He now works for Boeing in Brisbane.
On December 12 we drove out to Orange where we stayed overnight with my cousin, his wife and his mother and the following morning I was driven by another mate, John Boatswain to the clinic for the biopsy. Afterwards we caught a cab back to their home and spent the afternoon sitting and relaxing in the backyard. We drove home to Portland on the Friday morning.
The following Tuesday (December 19) we drove back out to Orange once more as I had an appointment at Central West Nuclear Medicine at 9:00am the following for a full bone scan to be followed up by an appointment with the urologist to receive the prognosis.
The address we were given for the scan was wrong and when we did find the right place I was given an injection and told to go away for two hours to wait for it to take effect before coming back to have the actual scan. This would have been areal 'pain-in-the-arse' had we not been staying with relatives who lived close by.
When we did return, and after laying on the bench for for what seemed like an hour, I was told that i would have to go and have another pee because my bladder was too full and blocking the image.
This I did and was told that the scan came back the same again they would have to get me to come in the following day for it to be done yet again. I explained that this would NOT be the case as I was driving home that afternoon and whatever they got would have to suffice.
In the end it was decided that what they had was good enough and I was asked to wait for the images to be processed so that I could take them with me to the urologist.
By the time I got there I was running around a quarter-hour late however, so was he!
The eventual prognosis given was that I do have inoperable and incurable Prostate Cancer.
The good news was that it had not yet reached my bones. and that I wasn't going to die immediately.
The bad news was that it is extremely advanced and that I have somewhere between two and perhaps as much as ten years left with treatment. This was a lot to take in on what was our twentieth Wedding Anniversary!
I commenced immediately with a course of Androcur tablets with regular quarterly implant injections of Zoladex 10.8mg that started on January 3, 2007.
Within three months the PSA levels had dropped to 4.4 placing the cancer in remission and making both Shirley and myself very happy. It meant we could at least something of a life together and we looked forward to going to Sydney on the first weekend in June to celebrate our combined birthdays - she was to turn eighty on May 17, 2007 and I was to turn fifty-five on June 14, 2007.
As the time drew closer we contacted our dear friend, Gayle Kennedy to see if she could arrange some accommodation for us in the Balmain area as that was where we planned to spend most of the weekend. Gayle, in turn, decided that it would be a great idea to organise a benefit for myself which could also act as a combined party for the pair of us and we said, "OK!"
She contacted many old friends and musicians and the weekend was well under way with Grant (now living in Brisbane) deciding to fly down for the occasion (he'd been the bass player in BEACHHEAD back in 1980 after Raoul Hawkins had left for New York to study), Matt Dwyer who'd been a mainstay of BEACHHEAD'S BLUES throughout the mid-1990s was flying back from New Zealand and on it went! A great party was brewing!
After being told about them by Gayle, we booked our room for the weekend at Balmain Lodge at $80.00/night and gave them credit card details - more about this as we go on.
Shirley had not been much, if anything, for sometime and as her birthday approached our GP suggested that she start taking multi-vitamins to aid her. Unfortunately, the very first Myadec capsule she took got caught in her throat and scratched it causing irritation and an asthma attack. She was immediately placed on Prednisone for the short term and told to increase her use of Ventolin.
She seemed to come good and we continued on with our plans to go to Sydney.
Friday, June 1 finally arrived and we dropped our dog, 'Mouse' at our mate, Paul Rowe's home here in Portland and continued on down to Sydney arriving in Balmain around 1:30pm.
I told Shirley to wait in the vehicle while I went and booked us in, expecting everything to be OK. It wasn't!
The manager was nowhere to be found and I was led to the top of the building, some five-plus flights of stairs by an idiot who lived there and who kept asking me if I had anybody with me to which I kept replying yes that my wife was in the car. We eventually arrived at an abysmal 'twin-share' room instead of the 'double' I had requested and (effectively) paid for some weeks earlier. The stupid prick then asked me if I wanted the room and I told him that we obviously had to take it because we had just driven more than a hundred miles to get there.
I eventually managed to speak to the manager and he sorted the room by putting us into another on the first floor (a 'double') when he discovered that the people who booked into that room hadn't yet arrived. Not the way to run a business and I would advise anybody reading this not to have anything to do with Balmain Lodge at anytime in the future.
We were completely buggered by the time we finally got everything into the room and settled down. But we still had to go and visit our son, Marc before we could properly relax. Another six flights of stairs awaited us as his new unit is on the top floor of the block he lives in at Rozelle.
When we eventually did get back to our lodgings, I poured a scotch big enough to drown a full-sized rat and it didn't even touch the sides on the way down.
After resting up and eating we made our way steadily down Darling Street to the Unity Hall Hotel where we meeting up with friend, Cyn Allen and later (when he arrived from Melbourne) Walker Blashka.
It was great to catch up with many of the boys that I used to sit-in with at the Unity back in the days when I lived in Balmain in the early 1980s who still played in the Friday night band and we also enjoyed a few drinks with both Cyn & Walker when he arrived.
Cyn drove us back to the Lodge afterwards and we both went straight to bed. At sometime in the wee small hours I was getting out of bed to visit the toilet and the chair I was using to help myself up flipped and I fell landing on my chest on the edge of the seat badly bruising myself right across the breast just under my tits.
On the Saturday morning I strolled down Darling Street and bought the Sydney Morning Herald for Shirley to read and also bought myself a hamburger which, while tasting wonderful, cost the earth.
Initially, we were going to go to the Strawberry Hills Hotel in Surry Hills and catch the Eclipse Alley Five however, we decided that we'd just go straight to the Cooks River Motor Boat Club at Tempe where the benefit was to be because we'd been knocked back for the half-fare Taxi Subsidy and it would have cost too much to go to Surry Hills first up, plus Dave Jensen and his band were playing at the club in the afternoon.
As it was, the cab fare came to around thirty bucks - pretty fair whack.
We settled in at the club and enjoyed the music, if not the whisky which tasted very much like iodine. We switched to beer until the bar manageress arrived and all was sorted.
The night was a pretty fair success and we pocketed enough cash at the end to both pay for our weekend and a few bills when we got back home to Portland but more was to happen.
In the wee smalls of Sunday morning, Shirley had got out of bed and gone to the bathroom/toilet and not noticing that the floor was wet had slipped backwards on her way out - slamming her head into the wall of the shower cubicle, very nearly knocking herself out and gashing her shin on the rise between the cubicle and the main floor area. She had called out to me, but I was fast asleep and hadn't heard her and only found out when she made it back to the room and woke me to tell me.
Originally we'd been going to drive down to Albion Park on the Monday to visit with Heather & Kevin Casey for a couple of nights before coming home but had decided against it and rang them to explain the bad luck we'd been having.
Sunday night wasn't much better.
After her fall, Shirley wasn't feeling at all well and spent most of Sunday in bed while I wandered down to the Riverview Hotel for a couple of beers and a pie for lunch. We also made arrangements to meet up with both Terri McCormack and Dave Stevens there for a drink around 5:30am and then go onto the Unity to catch the Sunday night band and then have some dinner.
On our way out I missed the bottom two steps and fell face first into the concrete retaining wall at the bottom, very nearly breaking my glasses and we decided that we would leave for home first thing on the Monday morning.
Sadly, this was to be our last trip to Sydney together as, after arriving home to Portland, Shirley developed pleurisy and we were both on antibiotics from then on.
Our final visit to our GP was on Thursday - August 2, 2007 and Shirley was given a prescription for a fairly strong antibiotic called Rulide (she was allergic to penicillin) and I was given a course of Augmentin.
She didn't improve and grew steadily worse, I was unable to sleep in the bed and had to try sleeping in a sitting position on our settee. On Saturday night, I finally tried to asleep in the bed and succeeded until around 5:30am.
When I climbed out of bed, I discovered that my darling girl hadn't slept at all and had been sitting up in bed all night just trying to breathe. I called the ambulance to her at around 6:30am and she was driven into Lithgow Hospital where she spent most of the day in the Emergency Department with myself at her bedside. I had driven in immediately after the ambulance had gone.
They were getting wildly different blood pressure readings from one arm to the other and decided to settle on using the right arm in the end. She was also on oxygen to try and bring her blood gases up. Eventually, she was moved from Emergency up to the Wards at around 3:00pm and I stayed wit her for a short time before deciding to head home and try to get a few things done. She requested that I bring the Herald and a book that she had been reading in for her on the Monday morning when I returned.
When I arrived back on the Monday morning they still had not found the ECG that had been done on her back in June - it transpired that it was because the silly bastards kept misspelling our family name. Eventually they found it.
By mid-morning a decision had been made to move her from where she was into the High Dependency Ward because they were worried about a reading the got and thought that perhaps she'd had a mild heart attack overnight.
Just as I was about to leave for home in the afternoon, I saw her attending doctor in the coffee shop and asked him how she was going. He told me to follow him back to the bed as he wanted to speak with both of us.
He said that he wanted her to be moved to the cardiac Care Unit in the Nepean Hospital at Penrith as he thought the problem was more serious than at first thought and that they (Lithgow Hospital) didn't have the facilities to care for her in the event. She was to be driven down by road ambulance that evening and I would follow in our truck.
I made a dash back to Portland after ringing Barry & Beverley Smythe and asking them to look after 'Mouse' for me and tracked down Mike Moore (my next-door neighbour) to ask him to both feed the cats and water Shirley's plants while we were away because i had no idea how long I'd be. The other thing I did was ring Grant in Brisbane to see if he thought that his sister, or mother might be able to put me up while my sweetheart was in Nepean. He rang back with details of who, where and when within five minutes and I drove back into Lithgow to wait for the ambulance.
I had grabbed all my meagre clothing possessions (both clean and dirty) and thrown them into a couple of bags along with all my pills and whatever prescriptions I had.
As it turned out, the doctor had wanted her to have at least a paramedic and a nurse to be in the ambulance with her for the trip and this was not achievable that particular night. She was in for a ride in the air ambulance - her first trip (sadly, also her last) in a helicopter and she was excited at the prospect.
It never arrived 'til after 10:00pm and I was unable to follow down that night, so I quickly made arrangements with Barry & Beverley that I stay overnight at their home and drive down first thing on the Tuesday morning (August 7).
After a cold night, I left Lithgow at around 7:00am and arrived at Nepean around 9:15am - the traffic hadn't been too bad and I had a good run through.
When I arrived at the hospital, drove all over the parking areas trying to find a 'Disability' spot - all 100-odd were taken and apparently had been so since 7:30am according to a security guard I spoke with. I finished up parking in what turned out be a boom-gated area that cost $5.00/day.
After being directed to the unit where Shirley was, I went in to see her and discovered yet again that her name had been misspelled - eventually leading me to discover also that they had booked her in as a 'private' patient instead of as a 'public' and that I had to go to Admissions to get everything sorted before I could sit down and talk with her properly. She was still in very high spirits after her 'helicopter ride' of the previous evening and we spoke at length about it.
Eventually I met her attending doctor, V. Shenoy who informed me that the difference in blood pressure reading had been because of her having an embolism in her left arm which was also causing her erratic heartbeat (atrial fibrillation) for which she was being given heparin via intravenous drip in order to thin the blood and dissolve the clot. She was also being given antibiotics (intravenously) and Ventolin nebulisers on a very regular basis for her breathing problems. She was continuously on oxygen as well.
My darling had not been eating very well, or much, for a very long time and her weight had dropped drastically to less than 30kg from her previous normal of around 65kg and I could not get her to eat. She was putting it down to not being able to wear her lower dentures and being unable to chew anything and therefore not enjoying much of what she was eating.
The hospital placed her on a purée diet and trying to get her to drink high-protein milk drinks they were giving her, but the little bugger was not eating what she did get, saying that it tasted like shit.
She faithfully promised me that she would start to eat and attempt to get better and come home to me so that we could go and see our friends in Melbourne and elsewhere, but she never made it.
The last couple of days it was almost as if she was giving up and, between when I saw her on the Thursday afternoon (August 9) and getting back to her the following morning, her breathing went to the shit can I truly do not know if we exchanged any words on the Friday morning because when I got there she was surrounded by nurses hunting for a vein to feed in antibiotics and a portable chest X-Ray machine. That was at around 9:30am.
I rang Marc at 11:15am and told him to get to the hospital as quickly a he could because I thought we'd lose her. At around 11:30am, Dr. Shenoy confirmed my suspicions and I rang Marc back to tell him to hurry.
I was given the option of her possibly being placed on a 'life-support' machine indefintely to which I answered an emphatic, NO! It was neither what she, nor I wanted for either of us.
Shortly thereafter I was told that she wasn't a candidate anyway and that they would make her as comfortable as possible until she passed and that it was likely to happen within the hour. That was at midday on Friday (August 10th). Marc arrived by around 3:00pm and she fought on until she gave her last tiny little breat at 4:15am on Saturday- August 11, 2007 as we both sat at her bedside.
Her funeral service was held at Hopkins Memorial Uniting Church in Lithgow on Wednesday - August 22, 2007 and presided over by Church Elder, Norm MacFarlane - Funeral Service.
The following Tuesday (December 19) we drove back out to Orange once more as I had an appointment at Central West Nuclear Medicine at 9:00am the following for a full bone scan to be followed up by an appointment with the urologist to receive the prognosis.
The address we were given for the scan was wrong and when we did find the right place I was given an injection and told to go away for two hours to wait for it to take effect before coming back to have the actual scan. This would have been areal 'pain-in-the-arse' had we not been staying with relatives who lived close by.
When we did return, and after laying on the bench for for what seemed like an hour, I was told that i would have to go and have another pee because my bladder was too full and blocking the image.
This I did and was told that the scan came back the same again they would have to get me to come in the following day for it to be done yet again. I explained that this would NOT be the case as I was driving home that afternoon and whatever they got would have to suffice.
In the end it was decided that what they had was good enough and I was asked to wait for the images to be processed so that I could take them with me to the urologist.
By the time I got there I was running around a quarter-hour late however, so was he!
The eventual prognosis given was that I do have inoperable and incurable Prostate Cancer.
The good news was that it had not yet reached my bones. and that I wasn't going to die immediately.
The bad news was that it is extremely advanced and that I have somewhere between two and perhaps as much as ten years left with treatment. This was a lot to take in on what was our twentieth Wedding Anniversary!
I commenced immediately with a course of Androcur tablets with regular quarterly implant injections of Zoladex 10.8mg that started on January 3, 2007.
Within three months the PSA levels had dropped to 4.4 placing the cancer in remission and making both Shirley and myself very happy. It meant we could at least something of a life together and we looked forward to going to Sydney on the first weekend in June to celebrate our combined birthdays - she was to turn eighty on May 17, 2007 and I was to turn fifty-five on June 14, 2007.
As the time drew closer we contacted our dear friend, Gayle Kennedy to see if she could arrange some accommodation for us in the Balmain area as that was where we planned to spend most of the weekend. Gayle, in turn, decided that it would be a great idea to organise a benefit for myself which could also act as a combined party for the pair of us and we said, "OK!"
She contacted many old friends and musicians and the weekend was well under way with Grant (now living in Brisbane) deciding to fly down for the occasion (he'd been the bass player in BEACHHEAD back in 1980 after Raoul Hawkins had left for New York to study), Matt Dwyer who'd been a mainstay of BEACHHEAD'S BLUES throughout the mid-1990s was flying back from New Zealand and on it went! A great party was brewing!
After being told about them by Gayle, we booked our room for the weekend at Balmain Lodge at $80.00/night and gave them credit card details - more about this as we go on.
Shirley had not been much, if anything, for sometime and as her birthday approached our GP suggested that she start taking multi-vitamins to aid her. Unfortunately, the very first Myadec capsule she took got caught in her throat and scratched it causing irritation and an asthma attack. She was immediately placed on Prednisone for the short term and told to increase her use of Ventolin.
She seemed to come good and we continued on with our plans to go to Sydney.
Friday, June 1 finally arrived and we dropped our dog, 'Mouse' at our mate, Paul Rowe's home here in Portland and continued on down to Sydney arriving in Balmain around 1:30pm.
I told Shirley to wait in the vehicle while I went and booked us in, expecting everything to be OK. It wasn't!
The manager was nowhere to be found and I was led to the top of the building, some five-plus flights of stairs by an idiot who lived there and who kept asking me if I had anybody with me to which I kept replying yes that my wife was in the car. We eventually arrived at an abysmal 'twin-share' room instead of the 'double' I had requested and (effectively) paid for some weeks earlier. The stupid prick then asked me if I wanted the room and I told him that we obviously had to take it because we had just driven more than a hundred miles to get there.
I eventually managed to speak to the manager and he sorted the room by putting us into another on the first floor (a 'double') when he discovered that the people who booked into that room hadn't yet arrived. Not the way to run a business and I would advise anybody reading this not to have anything to do with Balmain Lodge at anytime in the future.
We were completely buggered by the time we finally got everything into the room and settled down. But we still had to go and visit our son, Marc before we could properly relax. Another six flights of stairs awaited us as his new unit is on the top floor of the block he lives in at Rozelle.
When we eventually did get back to our lodgings, I poured a scotch big enough to drown a full-sized rat and it didn't even touch the sides on the way down.
After resting up and eating we made our way steadily down Darling Street to the Unity Hall Hotel where we meeting up with friend, Cyn Allen and later (when he arrived from Melbourne) Walker Blashka.
It was great to catch up with many of the boys that I used to sit-in with at the Unity back in the days when I lived in Balmain in the early 1980s who still played in the Friday night band and we also enjoyed a few drinks with both Cyn & Walker when he arrived.
Cyn drove us back to the Lodge afterwards and we both went straight to bed. At sometime in the wee small hours I was getting out of bed to visit the toilet and the chair I was using to help myself up flipped and I fell landing on my chest on the edge of the seat badly bruising myself right across the breast just under my tits.
On the Saturday morning I strolled down Darling Street and bought the Sydney Morning Herald for Shirley to read and also bought myself a hamburger which, while tasting wonderful, cost the earth.
Initially, we were going to go to the Strawberry Hills Hotel in Surry Hills and catch the Eclipse Alley Five however, we decided that we'd just go straight to the Cooks River Motor Boat Club at Tempe where the benefit was to be because we'd been knocked back for the half-fare Taxi Subsidy and it would have cost too much to go to Surry Hills first up, plus Dave Jensen and his band were playing at the club in the afternoon.
As it was, the cab fare came to around thirty bucks - pretty fair whack.
We settled in at the club and enjoyed the music, if not the whisky which tasted very much like iodine. We switched to beer until the bar manageress arrived and all was sorted.
The night was a pretty fair success and we pocketed enough cash at the end to both pay for our weekend and a few bills when we got back home to Portland but more was to happen.
In the wee smalls of Sunday morning, Shirley had got out of bed and gone to the bathroom/toilet and not noticing that the floor was wet had slipped backwards on her way out - slamming her head into the wall of the shower cubicle, very nearly knocking herself out and gashing her shin on the rise between the cubicle and the main floor area. She had called out to me, but I was fast asleep and hadn't heard her and only found out when she made it back to the room and woke me to tell me.
Originally we'd been going to drive down to Albion Park on the Monday to visit with Heather & Kevin Casey for a couple of nights before coming home but had decided against it and rang them to explain the bad luck we'd been having.
Sunday night wasn't much better.
After her fall, Shirley wasn't feeling at all well and spent most of Sunday in bed while I wandered down to the Riverview Hotel for a couple of beers and a pie for lunch. We also made arrangements to meet up with both Terri McCormack and Dave Stevens there for a drink around 5:30am and then go onto the Unity to catch the Sunday night band and then have some dinner.
On our way out I missed the bottom two steps and fell face first into the concrete retaining wall at the bottom, very nearly breaking my glasses and we decided that we would leave for home first thing on the Monday morning.
Sadly, this was to be our last trip to Sydney together as, after arriving home to Portland, Shirley developed pleurisy and we were both on antibiotics from then on.
Our final visit to our GP was on Thursday - August 2, 2007 and Shirley was given a prescription for a fairly strong antibiotic called Rulide (she was allergic to penicillin) and I was given a course of Augmentin.
She didn't improve and grew steadily worse, I was unable to sleep in the bed and had to try sleeping in a sitting position on our settee. On Saturday night, I finally tried to asleep in the bed and succeeded until around 5:30am.
When I climbed out of bed, I discovered that my darling girl hadn't slept at all and had been sitting up in bed all night just trying to breathe. I called the ambulance to her at around 6:30am and she was driven into Lithgow Hospital where she spent most of the day in the Emergency Department with myself at her bedside. I had driven in immediately after the ambulance had gone.
They were getting wildly different blood pressure readings from one arm to the other and decided to settle on using the right arm in the end. She was also on oxygen to try and bring her blood gases up. Eventually, she was moved from Emergency up to the Wards at around 3:00pm and I stayed wit her for a short time before deciding to head home and try to get a few things done. She requested that I bring the Herald and a book that she had been reading in for her on the Monday morning when I returned.
When I arrived back on the Monday morning they still had not found the ECG that had been done on her back in June - it transpired that it was because the silly bastards kept misspelling our family name. Eventually they found it.
By mid-morning a decision had been made to move her from where she was into the High Dependency Ward because they were worried about a reading the got and thought that perhaps she'd had a mild heart attack overnight.
Just as I was about to leave for home in the afternoon, I saw her attending doctor in the coffee shop and asked him how she was going. He told me to follow him back to the bed as he wanted to speak with both of us.
He said that he wanted her to be moved to the cardiac Care Unit in the Nepean Hospital at Penrith as he thought the problem was more serious than at first thought and that they (Lithgow Hospital) didn't have the facilities to care for her in the event. She was to be driven down by road ambulance that evening and I would follow in our truck.
I made a dash back to Portland after ringing Barry & Beverley Smythe and asking them to look after 'Mouse' for me and tracked down Mike Moore (my next-door neighbour) to ask him to both feed the cats and water Shirley's plants while we were away because i had no idea how long I'd be. The other thing I did was ring Grant in Brisbane to see if he thought that his sister, or mother might be able to put me up while my sweetheart was in Nepean. He rang back with details of who, where and when within five minutes and I drove back into Lithgow to wait for the ambulance.
I had grabbed all my meagre clothing possessions (both clean and dirty) and thrown them into a couple of bags along with all my pills and whatever prescriptions I had.
As it turned out, the doctor had wanted her to have at least a paramedic and a nurse to be in the ambulance with her for the trip and this was not achievable that particular night. She was in for a ride in the air ambulance - her first trip (sadly, also her last) in a helicopter and she was excited at the prospect.
It never arrived 'til after 10:00pm and I was unable to follow down that night, so I quickly made arrangements with Barry & Beverley that I stay overnight at their home and drive down first thing on the Tuesday morning (August 7).
After a cold night, I left Lithgow at around 7:00am and arrived at Nepean around 9:15am - the traffic hadn't been too bad and I had a good run through.
When I arrived at the hospital, drove all over the parking areas trying to find a 'Disability' spot - all 100-odd were taken and apparently had been so since 7:30am according to a security guard I spoke with. I finished up parking in what turned out be a boom-gated area that cost $5.00/day.
After being directed to the unit where Shirley was, I went in to see her and discovered yet again that her name had been misspelled - eventually leading me to discover also that they had booked her in as a 'private' patient instead of as a 'public' and that I had to go to Admissions to get everything sorted before I could sit down and talk with her properly. She was still in very high spirits after her 'helicopter ride' of the previous evening and we spoke at length about it.
Eventually I met her attending doctor, V. Shenoy who informed me that the difference in blood pressure reading had been because of her having an embolism in her left arm which was also causing her erratic heartbeat (atrial fibrillation) for which she was being given heparin via intravenous drip in order to thin the blood and dissolve the clot. She was also being given antibiotics (intravenously) and Ventolin nebulisers on a very regular basis for her breathing problems. She was continuously on oxygen as well.
My darling had not been eating very well, or much, for a very long time and her weight had dropped drastically to less than 30kg from her previous normal of around 65kg and I could not get her to eat. She was putting it down to not being able to wear her lower dentures and being unable to chew anything and therefore not enjoying much of what she was eating.
The hospital placed her on a purée diet and trying to get her to drink high-protein milk drinks they were giving her, but the little bugger was not eating what she did get, saying that it tasted like shit.
She faithfully promised me that she would start to eat and attempt to get better and come home to me so that we could go and see our friends in Melbourne and elsewhere, but she never made it.
The last couple of days it was almost as if she was giving up and, between when I saw her on the Thursday afternoon (August 9) and getting back to her the following morning, her breathing went to the shit can I truly do not know if we exchanged any words on the Friday morning because when I got there she was surrounded by nurses hunting for a vein to feed in antibiotics and a portable chest X-Ray machine. That was at around 9:30am.
I rang Marc at 11:15am and told him to get to the hospital as quickly a he could because I thought we'd lose her. At around 11:30am, Dr. Shenoy confirmed my suspicions and I rang Marc back to tell him to hurry.
I was given the option of her possibly being placed on a 'life-support' machine indefintely to which I answered an emphatic, NO! It was neither what she, nor I wanted for either of us.
Shortly thereafter I was told that she wasn't a candidate anyway and that they would make her as comfortable as possible until she passed and that it was likely to happen within the hour. That was at midday on Friday (August 10th). Marc arrived by around 3:00pm and she fought on until she gave her last tiny little breat at 4:15am on Saturday- August 11, 2007 as we both sat at her bedside.
Her funeral service was held at Hopkins Memorial Uniting Church in Lithgow on Wednesday - August 22, 2007 and presided over by Church Elder, Norm MacFarlane - Funeral Service.
Had it not been for the oft-mentioned Grant Watson, I would not have had anything to wear to my own wife's funeral. He is/was a true gem.
After Shirley's death on the Saturday morning I drove Marc back to Rozelle, stayed there all day and slept in his bed that night while he stayed up and watched the football on TV. I then left and drove home early on the Sunday morning, picking 'Mouse' up from Barry & Beverley's on the way through. Grant flew down from Brisbane that night and drove up to Portland on the Monday morning, took me into Lithgow and bought me lunch, clothes and assorted other bits and pieces and took me to see the funeral director.
The following day he drove me out to Bathurst where he bought me the clothes that I actually wore to the funeral and a pair of leather shoes that haven't seen any use since.
Sadly, because of work commitments he was unable to come back down for the funeral, although many did get there. Including my two nephews from Goulburn who drove up, for the day, old friend Kevin Casey who came up from Albion Park to attend and also read the eulogy, several of my cousins and their families, Matthew Ross, Max Farrell, Frank Corby, Adam Barnard, Adam Sivell, Nick Hazzard (all former members of BEACHHEAD), Stefan Sernek (from PSYCHO ZYDECO) and Stan Little (a friend we'd made through the music some years previous).
Apart from all these there were our many friends and neighbours from around the area.
The many friends have all said to me to come and visit with them when I get the chance, or to ring them if and when I feel the need to talk and I may yet get around to doing some of that. However, for the time being I am holding back on the phone calls, or my bill would be far higher than it already is. I can't travel for a couple of reasons at this stage either;
- On August 30, while climbing onto a chair to change a light globe, I slipped and put a huge hole in my right foreleg that is still a long way from healing.
- Even were I able to travel, at present I am broke and having difficulty getting the few bills paid that I have without even thinking about driving anywhere.
Everyday passes and everyday I miss my darling more. I am totally lost without the only thing that I ever truly had in my life for the past 21-plus years. I don't feel like eating much, I'm drinking far too much booze, I can't have a shower, or wash my hair properly because of the leg and I don't even feel much like watching television or sitting here at the computer.
I've made the decision that I am going to file for bankruptcy to clear what debt I do have, a situation brought on by GE CreditLine cancelling my account after I'd paid them $300-plus to try and get a little ahead with the account and informed them of Shirley's death. The reason given was that the account had been opened in both names and could no longer continue because Shirley would be responsible for any debt incurred and was no longer alive.
The fact that I had been paying the money since her death was of no consequence to those arseholes. So now they will get none of it and with my own impending demise in the next few years I am not in the slightest bit worried about a bankruptcy hanging over my head.
Here it is, very nearly twelve months on (to the day) since I started having the problems with my health and everything that can go wrong in my life seems to be doing just that. I am just wondering what the morrow will bring my way!
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