Broken Dreams by Bill Dodd

Author:Bill Dodd
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography/Personal Memoirs
ISBN: 9780702250200
Publisher: University of Queensland Press
Published: 2009-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

7

After my rehabilitation at PA, I was put on a plane and flown to Roma. (The only other flight I’d ever experienced was when I went from Katherine to Auvergne station—all that now seemed like another world to me.) I was booked to stay at a nursing home called Westhaven, because there was nowhere in Mitchell with suitable facilities for a quadraplegic. I knew that Westhaven was really a nursing home for old people.

I arrived there in April 1984. I felt a bit scared, and I found that Westhaven was very different to the way I’d pictured it in my mind. That first night I ate supper in the dining-room all by myself. I felt a real stranger; for the first time in my life I was really alone. Westhaven was to be the place I called “home” for the next five years and eight months. The next youngest patient to me was aged about fifty.

I was eighteen, and apart from the fact that I was in a wheelchair I now felt as fit as a fiddle. When I arrived at Westhaven I still hadn’t accepted being confined to my wheelchair; I still thought I could go out partying all night. I used to get away with quite a lot; sometimes I did go out until the early hours of the morning. I would have been in strife if I’d done that in Brisbane. I guess I was still as mad as a cut snake.

Gradually I got used to the other people at Westhaven, and came to understand that many elderly folk tend to become a bit confused, with loss of memory. Had I come to Westhaven just as a visitor, I might have thought differently—but in almost six years I learned a lot. Even so, some of the things that happened there I found hard to believe. There were about four people I could have a decent conversation with. It was really a pretty sad place; some of the patients would quickly slide downhill and chuck it in after they arrived there. You couldn’t afford to get too close or take a liking to any of those old people. If I hadn’t had the help of some very sympathetic nurses I don’t think I could have handled my long stay there too well.

I recall that soon after I arrived I was sitting outside my room one day, talking to Sister Ramage, when this old lady came walking towards us with no clothes on. I went as red as a beetroot—no matter where I looked she seemed to be there, and in the end I ducked outside.

Another time, as I was eating lunch in the dining-room with my back turned to the door, a big hand came out of nowhere and I watched a potato disappear off my plate. The hand belonged to a lady called Nell, who stuffed the potato in her mouth and took off. I learned a valuable lesson that day: never eat with your back to the door.

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