He watches when you're sleeping.

So on Christmas eve for the first time in my life I was the witness to someone’s will. It was a very strange experience. I’m up in the country at my parents house and my whole family is there for Christmas. For the first time in a few days I was alone in the house for about five minutes when the phone rang. It was a friend of my parents, someone whom I’ve known for years whom I shall refer to as David. His wife, a very good friend of my mothers, is currently in the last stages of her life after a hard fight against a particularly aggressive cancer. “Are your parents home?” he asked, but not like that, we made small talk ‘n’shit. I told him that weirdly, both of them were gone. “The thing is,” he said, “is that we need a witness to sign Janets will. Are you busy? I’ll come over and pick you up and we can do it now.”

“Of course,” I replied, “I’ll see you in a few minutes.”

I hung up, brushed my teeth and removed the comb from my hair that my niece had stuck there as a centrepiece earlier that morning when she had styled my hair into some sort of exotic sculpture.    

He arrived, picked me up and we went to his house. As we arrived a person who I did not recognise was throwing up into a plastic bowl as another lady dry retched into a garden.

“David, help Janet” yelled the lady in the garden between retches. I realised that the person who I had not recognised was in fact Janet, a woman whom I had had known for nearly twenty years. The disease had ravaged her body. Her once blond hair is gone, now she has a short grey fuzz. To say she looked thin would be understating the severity of the toll it had taken on her. David took her bowl, emptied it and bought it back while I stood there in shock. I asked if I could do anything, “Just take a seat inside, I’ll be with you in a minute” David told me. I went inside and sat down. After a while Janet came inside and we signed her will.  Under my occupation I put ‘unemployed’, in reflection it seems rather disrespectful. Then David drove me home. We chatted briefly on the two minute drive, about how he was starting to accept her death and all the legal rigmarole that they had to go through, how he and Janet had only recently started to talk about the fact that she was dying. We arrived home and he left, I went out the back of the house and saw my mother and I couldn’t hold it in any longer and I cried. I hugged my mother and I felt how tiny and thin she is, like a little bird. When I was at the Alfred I saw lot of very very sick people but it didn’t seem to bother me so much, but seeing someone that I knew, someone whom I considered fairly robust whose health had been attacked so savagely broke my heart. I thought of David on the drive home, completely manic, pushed almost to the brink of insanity watching his wife fight and lose. Watching her die and being completely and totally unable to do anything about it. I thought of my mother and how she had watched her best friend die slowly over the last few years and how before that another one of her friends had died a fairly slow and painful death. My mother is a very small woman and I don’t know how she manages to bare the weight of it all. We were talking and she said that Janet only had a few weeks left of being lucid before the drugs took their toll. “She will probably die of a chest infection. The cancer doesn’t get them, their immune system is weakened and something else gets in”. Her voice was almost totally empty, I say almost because in the depths you could hear resignation and a deep, deep sadness.

Christmas day was one of the best Christmas’s I’ve ever had. There was food and 4 generations of my family around the table and hardly any ring ins. Just my sister and her kids one of whom has a kid of their own (my grand nephew), my cousin, my folks and I. There was a retarded amount of food and all I did all day was smoke joints, eat ridiculous amounts of food and fall asleep in my chair. I also pooped a lot. I think I ate too much food which I didn’t know was a thing. I felt fat happy and content for most of the day. It was nice.

On boxing day one of my other cousins came out and stayed the night at my parents house. He’s a weird kid, I can’t deny it. Sometimes I think he might have a learning disability and other times I think he might be one of the most profound people I’ve ever met. One time we went to the pool together and I said that I hated pissing in the pool because I felt like I was just pissing my pants. He sat there quiet for a moment and then said, with all solemnity, “It’s not just your pants you’re pissing though is it, it’s every one else’s”. From that moment on I took great pleasure in pissing in the pool, knowing full well that I’m not just pissing my own pants. Anyway, so this time we hung out and at one stage we were hanging out watching the ducks. I looked over at him and his brow was furrowed like he was thinking deeply. “What’s up?” I asked him. “Have you ever wondered what a duck would look like with a monobrow?” he asked. I wondered how he had arrived at that particular platform on his train of thought, had he started with regular hair and worked his way down or had he started at eyebrows and then thought ‘Ah ha, monobrow, fucking nailed it”. Anyway, he had stayed the night and in the morning we were sitting with my mother having a cuppa when we heard the front gate clang open, my ma went around the corner to investigate and then we heard her call “Boys, can you come and help” so we leapt up and ran around and there was my mothers neighbour bawling her eyes out with a dead dog in her arms. My cousin bravely took the dog from her arms and I ran to grab an old sheet to wrap it in. My mother drove her neighbour to the local vet where the neighbour insisted that the vet listen to its heart in case it was just unconscious. There was no hope, the dog was well and truly dead. I could tell before they left by the tiny bugs that had stuck to its eyeballs.  

So that’s my Christmas, bookended by death, with babies and food in between. We still have no idea what killed the dog.   

ICU

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I’ve been doing this course for the last nine weeks, learning how to become a Health Services Assistant, which is basically like a hospital orderly. For the last two weeks I’ve been doing my placement at a big hospital in the city. I’ve basically been working from 7am till 3 everyday, unpaid, on what has got to be the longest job interview in the world. And I don’t care, because the things that I am doing and the things that I am learning are so incredible that I feel like I am going to shit my pants every time I walk through the doors. I get up at 4.30am, willingly, and I call people sir and ma’am and I mean it. It’s weird, I know, but not as weird as some of the things that I have witnessed in the last two weeks. My placement lasts for three weeks but the last week will be spent working in the kitchens and it’s really not as exciting as the rest of it. Anyway, on with the show.

So on my first day I rocked up, did my induction, then they rostered me on as a cleaner and took me to a ward and I began. I have only been in a hospital about five times in my life and never as a patient. The first ward I went to was the burns unit. If you’ve never seen injured people up close this is a good introduction. You want to look, you want to stare so bad it feels like your eyes have taken control of your body. Some are connected to machines and swathed in bandages. Some are up and mobile. All have pink new scar tissue and lots of it. I talked to a few people as I cleaned up around them. I really didn’t know what to say but I soon fell into the old retail patter. The rest of the day is a blur, as is much of the first week. On the first and second day of my second week I worked in the Intensive Care Unit. I cleaned around unconscious people and their grieving families and saw some things that I’d like to forget but are probably very import that I saw them in the first place. I saw a man sitting next to his wives bed, holding her hand in his, lowering his face to it as he wept. I thought they only do that in the movies, I said to myself as I watched. I watched the nurses turn a patient over so that they could clean their soiled bedclothes as and they turned them they continued to defecate. There is a line from a Louis C.K. piece where he asks “Have you ever seen an ass just shit?” and I had always found the image funny and when it happened in front of me I admit I had to turn away and look at the roof for a while. Also, there were a lot of wet farts which did nothing to help my inappropriate and maniacal grinning.

The two days that I spent in ICU were probably two of the most incredible days of my life. They are a bit of a blur as I’m pretty sure the entire time my eyes were like golf balls. It was like a spigot that stimulation shot out of and I could only catch so much before I had to move away in case I drowned. No one died whilst I was there but as I said to a friend, it was like they were in competition to see how close they could get. I watched them turn one guy and whenever they touched him his vitals would spike and we’d have to wait a few minutes before they could move him again. For someone who thinks about death a lot it certainly made me reconsider some of the notions that I previously held, it also confirmed a lot of things that I had thought about myself. I felt my heart break so many time on those two days that I thought that there was no way that I could go on with it, that there was no way in hell that I could do this for a living. And then I had a couple of really amazing positive experiences and I thought to myself, ‘Why would I want to do any thing else?’

Humans are funny creatures. The human body is an amazing machine, the mind a fragile network of synapses. We all process things differently, we can never be sure how we’ll react to a situation until we are presented with it. Quite often the situation will be a surprise and it will shock us somehow, lurch us off the familiar rails into areas previously unknown, previously unconsidered. This is my favourite territory. The outer limits. Quite often it will be a place of unimaginable misery but there is something to be said about pulling yourself out of the fire to emerge pink and clean. You can either kid yourself and pretend that life is beautiful and full of wonder and see everything with child like amazement, which is fine, because life is beautiful and full of wonder and deserves to be amazed at, but there is that other side, that thing where if you look at anyone, anyone at all, you can be certain that they are dying. Not now, maybe not anytime soon, but they are, inextricably marching towards the night. We all are. We can be scared of it and try and pretend that it doesn’t happen but I have found it better to confront it head on, look it right in the eyes and say OK. By agreeing to life we are agreeing to at some stage die and we are also agreeing to all the shitty little things that happen in between. Buy the ticket take the ride kind of deal. It’s a lot to take on and by the time we have realised that these are the terms and conditions it is too late, we are adults or teenagers and suicide is such poor form, so passé in these modern times.

I walked past a room during the week and glanced inside and saw a middle aged woman sitting on the edge of her bed. One leg had been amputated just below the knee and the other leg just above the ankle.  He bandaged stumps hung unevenly and she was just sitting there, staring down at the ground. It was so awful, so heart wrenching, so terrible that it gave me a sense of wonder, like I had seen something that not many people get to see. My own private horror show, a misery en scène, if you were.

In ICU I helped turn a patient who was quite distressed, possibly suffering from advanced dementia, maybe he was just crazy. As we tried to roll him over so the nurses could clean him he struck out at me and started trying to swat me away. I held him gently and let him have at it, talking to him the whole time, trying to ease his distress. His eyes were full of fear and as I talked to him I could feel him start to relax and soon he was calm. We dressed him and then moved on to the next patient that needed our help. It felt good and it felt right.