This week I’ve been to Melbourne for a two-day meeting which I had intrepidly volunteered to co-chair, then I played catch-up with other work and volunteering commitments and worked on my final assignment for my first unit of a creative writing graduate certificate. As I’ve been focusing on script writing assignments, I’ve tried not to let my book project get too far behind. I’ve multi-tasked by working on scenes from the book, transforming them into stage versions.
Today I took time with my sisters to mark the nearly one year deathiversary of our beloved Mum. We can’t be together on the actual day, so we got together beforehand.
The combination of the melancholy – Mum’s been gone for nearly a year now – and the subject of my book is all about recovery from a single incident trauma – and the Melbourne meeting was related activism I haven’t delved into for a while – must have made this podcast episode jump out at me. The Uses of Adversity, featuring Martha Beck.
She described the analogy of pain, of sorrow, something we want to stop feeling as soon as possible – like an unripe fruit. But if we can sit with these uncomfortable feelings, they can soften, ripen and sweeten. Anger can become clear seeing. Fear can become courage. Sorrow can become compassion.
That’s what I needed to hear today. And if you needed to hear it too, here you are.
On a wild, wet Saturday a couple of weeks ago, I was scampering across Perth, spreading myself across several different writing events on that one day. I missed the interview with Helen Garner, arguably one of Australia’s greatest living writers, at the WA Museum. Luckily Gillian O’Shaughnessy took notes on Helen’s writing tips, such as the importance of writing down dreams. I’m thinking especially the kind that wakes you up with the intensity of feelings it creates.
I did manage to catch Helen Garner later that day at the tiny launch event for issue 20 of Giramondo Press’s literary journal Heat. It was at a place called Light Works I’d never heard of and resembled more of an abandoned warehouse than a venue worthy of Ms Garner. I crowded in, and wondered, would Helen be there in person? It seemed too much to hope for.
She was there in person. Curious, quirky, engaged and friendly. I talked to her. Of course I talked to her. I wish I hadn’t momentarily forgotten the title of her latest book The Season and so had been spared uttering the gauche phrase, “Bloody loved that football book.” But she seemed unfazed. Even I knew it wasn’t the place to whip out my copy I’d brought with me to get her to sign it.
Instead, I took my place to the side, at the front to watch the four writers who were reading from earlier Heat editions. What a joy to hear Helen Garner read out her piece. A friend of mine was standing behind me so took a shot for me to remember the moment. These happenings in life to savour.
On the 3rd of August 1979, I was fourteen years old, and I’d never left Australia. I was about to head off for sixteen glorious weeks in Europe with my parents and my (plentiful) siblings.
I flicked through the photo album from that time today, marinading in the memories. Dad was up on the roof doing last minute repairs, I was saying farewell to indifferent cats. Not pictured: I remember I’d worn myself to a shred worrying if I had enough room in my suitcase for the required amount of sanitary pads for the duration of the holiday. I was too chicken-shit to try tampons, and it hadn’t occurred to me that there would in fact be sanitary ware available in one of the largest cities in the western world, aka London.
Meanwhile, Mum was looking at her garden one last time, hoping it would survive four months without her. She was an inveterate Anglophile and at 53 years of age, she was finally realising her ambition to get to the U.K. Also not pictured, she was awash with traveller’s remorse. “What am I doing? Am I really going to go through with this?” she said, more than once.
Despite her jitters, we left on schedule on the night of 3 August, with a huge group to farewell us at the airport. We flew through Bombay, where we weren’t allowed to disembark, before finally landing in Heathrow. Mum took a picture of the British Airways aircraft that had been her torturer throughout the long, sleepless flight.
The top left image is me looking out over the wasteland of London in the morning of 4th August 1979, jet lagged and slightly horrified. But when I first saw Westminster House and Big Ben in real life, I felt like I’d left my body. We used to have a pop-up picture book with both Westminster House and Big Ben in it. I loved to open up the pages and see this improbable wonder of architecture which is everywhere, everywhere in Europe.
The bottom left picture of me on the train in Scotland also jumped out at me as I flicked through the 1979 album. A glimpse of my still-child self, looking out the window.
As I plan yet another Europe trip–leaving later this month, I remember the 3rd of August 1979 as the date my world view was enlarged beyond the tight confines of Perth. So grateful that this first 1979 trip was not the last.
This week I had a mini-break in the mining town of Kalgoorlie, a 6-hour train ride from Perth. Kalgoorlie was my home from age 8 months to 3 years. No, I don’t remember it really. But I also went on several work trips there in 1988 and 1989 when I worked at the Western Australian Museum. So this week’s trip was a bit of an encounter with my young, ambitious 24-year-old self.
Initially hired in 1988 as the bright young thing who could explain the monstrous mainframe computer system to the History Department’s curatorial staff, I quickly pivoted. Given that I’d actually been employed to edit data files and write computer user manuals, I was always keen for distraction.
The History Department’s phone rang constantly with random, hugely varied questions about historical facts or perhaps an item they’d found in Aunt Doris’ attic they hoped was worth a fortune. I’d take down the complex queries, explain that I couldn’t advise them then and there, but would find out and let them know. Then I’d do some research, ask the curators for advice, and call them back. Often, people were crushed to know Aunt Doris’s old teapot might fetch $25 at best, or that a cherished story was just that, a story, and history had recorded otherwise.
Over time, my speciality became graciously refusing donations. By then I’d worked out that around of 90% of all museum collections sit in storage. Generally, whatever the donation was, we already had it in plentiful supply. People would turn up without an appointment, clutching their Mrs Potts iron they’d discovered in the shed. They dreamed it would be on permanent display, with their family’s name emblazoned on a brass display label forevermore.
I’d have to explain that we had several of that very same item already. I’d enlighten them about the shelves already groaning with items that wouldn’t ever see the light of display. I explained the heinous cost of museum storage, and how we had to reserve it for unique items. Then, I’d suggest the Education collection, where items that hadn’t been consecrated by formal museum accessioning processes could be handled and enjoyed by the students.
Usually the donor would be relieved that they wouldn’t have to carry the heavy item back home, and also feel virtuous they weren’t wasting taxpayer’s money with another surfeit collection item.
“It’s another Mrs Potts iron,” the senior curator would say to me. “You’ve really got the knack of gracious donation refusal. Would you mind?”
Getting the Kalgoorlie exhibition project in 1988 was a real coup for me. The Senior Curator whose vision it had been, had fallen pregnant unexpectedly and no-one else wanted the gig.
Each and every day I said to myself “well I’ve never done this before, but it doesn’t mean I can’t do it.”
Some of the exhibits I worked on back in 1988 are still there today. I think I can trace my handiwork, from when I helped gloss the wooden skirting boards of the old British Arms building for phase one of the project.
Phase two in 1989 was installing displays in the newly built modern museum adjacent to the British Arms building, known as the smallest pub in the Southern Hemisphere. My inexperience meant I made the rookie mistake of choosing items that sounded important on paper, but were dull to look at.
So the newer gallery displays from 1989 have been significantly changed but some items threw me right back to when I was one of the exhausted, exhilarated installation team. We got the galleries done in time. Just.
My personal involvement aside, the museum of the Goldfields is definitely worth a visit if you’re in town. The downstairs galleries change regularly and the current audio visual display to celebrate and preserve some of the many Aboriginal languages of the area is a must-see.
And for me, the chance to catch sight of my cherished colleague Julia Lawrinson’s Trapped in the shop was another bonus.
I don’t know if anyone needs to hear this nugget of wisdom from Fred Rogers’ mum. If you’ve never heard of Fred Rogers, he was a TV presenter, depicted in the biopic A Beautiful Day in the Neighbourhood in 2019, played by Tom Hanks. His mum advised him to “look for the helpers, you’ll always find people who are helping” when overwhelmed by scary news stories.
I was listening to an old episode of Tara Brach’s podcast, something I do regularly as a kind of energy re-set, an anti-dote to all the things on my social media feed.
“Look for the helpers,” I heard, and the first person who came to mind was the man at Murdoch station. This is my local train station in Perth. It has a bus station adjoining it to try and convince us to get out of our cars and into public transport. You walk through the bus stop to enter the train station.
He’s a bus station staff member, always with his clipboard, his mask, socks pulled up to the knees. I’m not exactly sure what his paid role is, but I do know he says hello to every single commuter on our way into the train station, and good bye as we head out. Day after day. Every single one of us.
Perhaps because I always catch his eye, he might add a little more to his greeting. “Happy Tuesday”, he might say in the morning, and “Safe home.” He does this for zero dollars of extra pay. Perhaps that’s where the magic comes in. I feel like I will have a good Tuesday, that I will get home safe, just because of his greeting.
At the end of May, I made my way home from work with a very large bouquet of flowers from colleagues for my 60th. He was too busy to greet me properly that day, but the next time he saw me, he said again, “Happy Birthday.”
He makes such a simple gesture, and yet it feels so complete, so kind.
What’s got my attention this week was an interview with Atul Gawande, one of my favourite clinician authors. Take, for example the first lines of the introduction his book, Being Mortal;
I learned about a lot of things in medical school, but mortality wasn’t one of them.
I listened to an interview with him in April this year on The Rest is Politics (well worth a listen) and this quote near the end of the episode leapt out at me. A clinician once told Atul, “say yes to everything before you’re 40, and say no to everything after you’re 40. What he meant by that was, you don’t know what you’re good at. You don’t know what you’re going to be excited by.”
So I’m twenty years late to the no party. This is in fact my third blog on the difficult art (for me) of saying no. I’ve mentioned before my advice card saying “No makes way for yes”This Truth Bomb card is yellowed from its exposure. It’s from of a set, and you can see it’s a different colour from all the other ones. I’ve returned it to its box today, singled out, now a different colour, but still largely unheeded.
I’ve said “yes” to a University Creative Writing course (at last) and that’s why the Sunday Blog is coming to you a little bit late today. I’ve been unable to tear myself away from watching Henrik Ibsen’s 1879 play A Doll’s House. Definitely excited by my studies, even at my age.
However, I said no to an impulse buy for hiking shoes yesterday on Facebook. I read the reviews before kissing away the bargain basement price of $50, today and today only.
This will be my last spider bite blog, I promise. For those of you who may need closure, my spider bite wound is healing very well and I’ve eventually settled into the community nursing service after my bumpy start. Perhaps next week will be the end of the need for wound dressing at all.
I’m taking a moment to rejoice in the reduced pain and increased healing, AND I’m reflecting on how little I knew before this misadventure befell me.
As someone who’s been a health advocate for more than quarter of a century, speaks fluent health acronyms, here are the things I didn’t know about managing a small traumatic wound on the back of my thigh:
For the walking wounded, no services or clinics will be open until morning, so if possible, stay home until about 7 or 8am, and hobble into the Emergency Department then. It may save you a lost night’s sleep in the hectic hurly burly of emergency.
Intravenous antibiotics are not a “one and done” situation. It will require you being attached to some kind of drip for at least four to five days.
The catheter they put in the back of your hand to administer drugs and take blood samples etc. has to be changed every 72 hours. But they can put a line in your arm that can stay for about 28 days. This could be what they call a PICC line which goes all the way to your heart, or in my case, a central line which just around the bicep area. Luckily for me.
Should your wound need cleaning, you will need to undergo a general anaesthetic, even if it seems a lot, it is necessary to manage the pain of that procedure.
Once that is done, you will have an open wound that needs to heal from the bottom up. What that means is that each day gauze will have to be poked into the wound. That’s after the old gauze from the day before has been removed. It will hurt but not for long.
So you’ll still have around 14-21 days of healing ahead after surgery, if everything is going your way, i.e. you are well, don’t have diabetes, manage to avoid further infection etc etc.
You will get better then get worse then get better then get worse over and over. It’s a jagged line, but it trends upwards (if you’re lucky.)
While I was given leaflets and leaflets and leaflets – outlining my rights as a patient, how to avoid falls, how to eat well (including a giant food pyramid image), information on smoking cessation, exercise and on and on, none of it gave me the information above that I needed. About what to expect from my body and from the likely trajectory of treatment and healing of a spider bite.
And here is the question I’ve been sitting with. Why are we always chided to be more empowered as patients, but we’re forced to bumble about in an information soup, which overwhelms but doesn’t inform or empower? Why is there such an information asymmetry between patients and the people who care for them? And why oh why has it taken me 25+ years to really see this issue?
Last Sunday I finished my blog praising the health system and intoning that my spider bite wound was healing. By Friday of this week I hobbled out of the non-profit organisation I’d been discharged to for my ongoing wound care. I clutched the back of my leg on my way to my car, crying and saying to my self, “I just want to go back to Hospital in the Home.”
And there it was, the perfect patient mask I like to adopt dropped away.
Tuesday this week I was reviewed at the hospital, with the unwelcome news that I would have to undergo surgery under a general anaesthetic for the wound to be incised and cleaned out. On the plus side, I could lose the bumbag and IV antibiotics and switch to tablets.
Before the surgery I was feeling on the up and up, the pain was diminishing and I was able to drive without agony and generally get on with life. Including MC’ing a delightful evening on Tuesday with graduates of the 2025 Emerging Writers Program in Perth while they had the opportunity to read out from their work of the last year. Definitely a peak moment of the year for me.
The surgery itself on Wednesday went well, although I maintained that sense of being in the wrong play, with the wrong lines. How could a simple spider bite lead all the way to the operating theatre?
In the way of the health world, once I emerged from surgery and lost the bumbag, I was discharged from Hospital in the Home to a non-profit organisation specialising in wound care. My fingernail hold on the Hospital in the Home service was due to the IV antibiotics only. Getting wound care from them as well was a bonus. Once it was wound care only, I was shuffled out of the hospital system.
I left their care with a giant hole not unlike a bullet wound in the back of my thigh. “It has to heal from the bottom up,” I’ve been told more than once. “Otherwise it will seal over and you’ll end up having to go under the knife again.” What this means in practice is that the wound has to be packed with a ribbon gauze which is removed and replaced each day. It didn’t seem to hurt when Hospital in the Home unpacked and re-packed the wound straight after surgery but perhaps that is just my false remembering.
It bloody hurts now and it would seem there are a couple of weeks of this to come. Sigh.
When the perfect patient mask slips I can feel the feelings that I skate over so effectively with positivity. Still, I’m reminded of Anne Lamott’s prayer “I pray not to be such a whiny, self-obsessed baby” I mean goodness, it’s just a spider bite, after all!
Somewhere on the night of 10th June 2025, a spider found its way into my bed. Perhaps I turned over and squashed it as it sought out its prey–other spiders if it was a White Tail Spider–which I suspect it was. Whatever, it bit the back of my right thigh. The pain woke me up, and the area commenced itching immediately.
As I react to all insect bites with impressive welts and redness, I tried not to worry as the days passed and it grew and itched.
By Sunday morning, I visited an urgent care clinic, unwilling to clog up the emergency department with my walking wound. The GP there scolded me, advised me it was infected, gave me a script for oral antibiotics and this advice; “Draw a circle around it, if it keeps growing and if you feel sick, go into emergency.”
As Sunday night crawled towards midnight, a quick check in the mirror showed redness spreading beyond the circle I’d drawn. Pain was about an 8/10, and I decided to Uber into the local emergency department.
My bad.
What I should’ve done is stay home until morning. I mistakenly thought the ambulatory emergency clinic was open all night long. This clinic is for people like myself, able to walk or hobble or shuffle about. Instead, I sprawled out on the black plastic chairs in the emergency room, waiting like everyone else, drifted in and out of sleep, listening to the incessant vomiting of the poor woman two rows behind me. I counted the sunk costs of all those hours already waited. The TV screen showed roughly the same number of people who were waiting, while the wait time yo-yo-ed from four hours to eight and back again. I didn’t want to leave until I got some actual treatment, and eventually I stopped checking the screen.
For a health advocate like myself, a mishap like this could be viewed as professional development. Mystery shopping the health system. There’s so much that comes into stark relief when sitting in the Emergency Department hour after hour.
Despite being a non-clinical health nerd, I thought IV antibiotics was a one and done situation. When I finally made it into the ambulatory care clinic at about 8 o’clock in the morning, they put a cannula in the back of my hand and flushed through some antibiotics. I thought I was just about done. I didn’t understand the harsh reality that I was now at a fork in the road. Either be admitted to a hospital bed with a drip – for say five days or perhaps more, or transfer to the hospital in the home service where I could be hooked up to IV antibiotics and get to go home and recuperate. I opted for the latter, and have a jaunty little bum bag with the bottle of antibiotics which is slowly administered 24/7 (see image of me in a yoga class with bum bag). So I either go in to the hospital to get the bottle changed and my wound dressed, or they come to my house.
It just so happened that the next day, Tuesday, I absolutely had to go into work. So by 5pm Monday I was finally released from hospital and able to gather my energies for Tuesday. When I slid into my seat in the meeting room, I felt like I’d scaled Everest.
As they days are progressing my wound is definitely healing. The kerfuffle of the spider bite is fading slowly but surely. But burning bright is my immense gratitude that I have been able to access such expert care and stay out of hospital, all for no cost to myself. Universal health care. Surely the ninth wonder of the world?
As I continue with the edits on my memoir, I want to share extracts with you, here and there. Especially when the editing intersects with my endless podcast listening, and there’s an insight that might be useful to you today.
As I’m talking about my memoir, I’d like to start with a trigger warning. I’m not going to go into details, but I am going to talk about trauma and recovery. If that’s not right for you today, please look after yourself and scroll on.
10th May 2002 is a defining date in my life. Before that date, I’d suffered very little of what I would deem trauma. But on the 10th May 2002 that innocence was gone when I survived a home invasion. That’s 23 years ago now, and I’ve been fortunate to have processed this trauma and build a life of not just surviving, but thriving. I know how many privileges have helped create this outcome, starting with a secure childhood with kind parents.
In my memoir edits I’ve been circling around in a chapter tackling trauma and recovery. And what I knew to be true for me in 2002, was that I needed a range of healing modalities, as I worked through the gigantic task of processing this event. Not just talk-based therapies, I needed bodywork–acupuncture, massage, yoga, self-defence and on and on.
Most people will have heard of Bessel van der Kolk, and his seminal work The Body Keeps the Score. Recently he was interviewed on Rangan Chatterjee’s podcast, and I loved what he said about yoga. He undertook three research studies using yoga for people recovering from trauma, and the results were very positive. He said;
“Then people say, yoga is the answer. No, yoga was a paradigm that helped us to understand how engaging with your body in a particular way is helpful, but it’s not the final word on the story”
Dr Bessel van der Kolk
Bessel longs to do a study on tango and trauma recovery, for example. He thinks the results would likely be just as positive.
The section of my memoir detailing the first year after the assault reads
“Adamant that my approach to my recovery would be multi-pronged, I aimed to use a diverse range of body therapies alongside counselling. I wasn’t going to leave trauma trapped in my cells. But when I looked around, I couldn’t see this accessible mix of body and mind therapies. I would have to work this out for myself.”
And I did. We all need to work it out for ourselves. Yoga won’t be right for everyone. Tangoing won’t be either. But the key is that our bodies hold the key to trauma recovery. There still isn’t a clear pathway for trauma survivors to find the right blend of talk-based and body-based therapies. But that doesn’t have to stop us seeking it for ourselves. Using a yoga app. Scouring the internet for tango lessons or exercise programs that are free or low cost. Trauma recovery requires a body and mind combined approach which can be a hit and miss affair. But it’s so well worth it. We are all worth it.
