The Things That Make Us by Nick Riewoldt

Author:Nick Riewoldt
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Allen & Unwin
Published: 2017-09-16T04:00:00+00:00

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Initially Maddie responded well to the transplant, but while her bone marrow started to function and produce cells she was forced to take other drugs that caused separate issues elsewhere in her system. Mum called me not long after the transplant and said Maddie had had a bad reaction, that she had fluid on her lungs and her kidneys weren’t functioning. Her kidneys were shot from all the chemo she had been given, and couldn’t flush her system like they were supposed to. She was very jaundiced and, as I saw to my shock when I arrived at the hospital, swollen from all the fluid inside her.

It was late when I got there and Mum was still on her way in. I said, ‘Hey!’ And Maddie was like, ‘Hey…’ then started gasping for breath, heaving in and out. Without thinking I said, ‘Oh fuck.’ She heard me and panicked, started asking, ‘What? What’s wrong?’ I don’t think she realised until then. I said, ‘Nothing Mooch,’ then rushed out and got a nurse. They knew what was happening. Soon after the head of the ward came in and said, ‘Righto Maddie, we’re just going to take you down to ICU. We need to put you on dialysis for a couple of hours to get some of this fluid away.’

Mum and I were shitting ourselves. God knows what Maddie was thinking. I’d never been in an intensive care unit before. In the end we became immune to it, it was like home, but walking through there for the first time it was confronting and very, very scary. I remember thinking, ‘This is it.’ Over the ensuing seven months, the number of people we saw come through that place who never came out, the families whose grief we witnessed…You’d be walking in or out and have to pass the waiting room, and they would be in there, trying to come to terms with the loss of a loved one. We saw things that will be with us forever.

Maddie went into ICU in July, and stayed there for 227 days. No patient since the ward had opened at Royal Melbourne Hospital had been in there that long. Over the five years of her illness she spent roughly eighteen months in hospital, but nothing could prepare you for those last seven months. She had the best room in ICU, which isn’t something to celebrate. It had a few windows and a little balcony, but for most of the time she was cytotoxic, or highly infectious, so anyone visiting had to wear the full gown, gloves and mask. You couldn’t even touch her skin because she was secreting dangerous chemicals from all the drugs she was being given.

Maddie spent five of those seven months unable to eat or drink, on and off dialysis, and using a tracheostomy, which creates an airway through the neck to deliver more oxygen to the lungs. Sometimes we were allowed to take her out on the balcony; my memory is stuck

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