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 late to you a little bit 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.
In this post-birthday week I’ve been enjoying some guilt-free voucher purchases, and bought a copy of Hannah Kent’s memoir Always Home, Always Homesick. It’s a compelling book unpacking her student exchange experience in Iceland in 2003 which inspired her first novel, Burial Rites. The true story of the last person executed in Iceland took hold of Hannah, not just in the writing of the novel, but in the subsequent years since the book’s publication.
What I noticed as I raced through the memoir, was my own longing as she described her decision to enrol in a creative writing course. This is a hurdle I have approached several times over my life, but like the horse that just won’t take the risk, I’m yet to vault over the jump and gallop around in a show of celebration. Of fulfilling a longing.
Not that I expect unfettered cantering around and high kicks on my trusty steed. I recognise the truth of Hannah’s description of beginning creative writing studies once back in Australia of the ” a sobering understanding that writing takes a teeth-gritting resilience above all else.” (Always Home, Always Homesick, page 170)
No sooner had I finished this book than I was tuning into an episode of the podcast We Can Do Hard Things where Martha Beck was doing a Q&A as a guest presenter. It was all about how to get more joy from life, there was another immediate, whole-body recognition for me when she advised that “if your fear and longing conflict, choose your longing. Given that I am now in my ahem- golden decade, Martha cheered me on no end as she said “your longing won’t abandon you.”
So I’m back on my horse, galloping towards the jump into creative writing studies, and this time I hope I’ll clear the fence with panache, teeth gritted in determination.
I turned 60 on Tuesday, and my birthday week culminated with a party that has been in the making for some years, in my head at least. Gatherings in my house are a somewhat vexed issue as darling husband prefers a quiet life while I’m an extrovert. Our house is small, my family and friends are numerous, so I’ve hankered for a gazebo, to manage the social overflow.
I wanted something with an apex roof. Darling husband wanted a pitched roof as it’s easier and cheaper to build. In an attempt to break this deadlock, once while he was away, I sought quotes for someone other than him to build it so I could achieve my vision. But Bunnings saved our marriage by offering a flat-pack gazebo that was exactly what I wanted. While still claiming the deadline of May would be difficult, darling husband had it up in no time. The gazebo in fact has been up since January and is now officially his idea.
And thus, I was able to hold my 60th at our house, under the gazebo. Why was that important to me? It’s the gathering of loved ones, the making of memories in our own home. The gesture of hospitality which is, well, generative. And despite all his hedging and stonewalling about the gazebo and the party, when it came down to it, darling husband delivered the speech of a lifetime that stole the show.
So the first gazebo party delivered it all. Family, friends old and new, colleagues. Delicious food, a fire and time to talk and even dance. And love, lots of love. In the quiet of the house the next day the walls still hummed with it.
I plucked this quotation from the poem Ten Thousand Flowers in Spring from the podosphere this week. I was listening to something designed to settle me down for the night. But instead, I sat bolt upright and scribbled it down. The quotation landed, whole and perfect like an egg. “One for the Sunday Blog” I said to myself.
In my well-worn theme of remembering and forgetting and remembering, this truth, that our thinking traps us, or as Tara Brach said (it was her podcast after all) we get lost in the trance of thinking. In the same episode she quotes a neuroscientist who says it takes 1.5 minutes – 1.5 minutes! for an emotion to move through our body unless we get to thinking. Thinking can trap emotions in our body for as long as we like. Like a life-time grudge, for example. So we bring the suffering on ourselves by our repetitive thoughts.
I love the idea of the 10,000 Spring flowers, I love the idea of letting the emotions move through and I love the idea getting on with some frolicking.
I hope it inspires a bit of a Sunday frolic for you too.
This week I tuned into a podcast all about memoir and journalling, just after returning from my recent Bali writing retreat. While there, I finished transcribing my 2006-2010 journal. (Procrastination about editing the memoir? How very dare you!)
Among other things, the podcast episode highlighted that journalling can sometimes be more effective than therapy. While that may or may not be true, one thing is certain. A re-read of journals can be a chance to re-acquaint yourself with the people you used to be. (Like that stranger who wanted to learn golf!) Journals can also reveal how we may have re-told experiences over the years which aren’t strictly, well, true.
Take Engagement Ring Gate. In 2008 my partner proposed in a kind of “let’s build the extension and let’s get married” sort of way. There was little certainty in his wording, and certainly no ring.
Engagement Ring Gate has been one of our go-to squabbles. I asserted that I had wanted an engagement ring, but in fact, what my journal pages revealed was this. Many women had said to me if they had their time over again, they would skip the engagement ring and get diamonds in the wedding band. So that’s what I chose, and that’s what I got.
And yet I still whinged.
My journal pages gifted me a sharp lesson in practising gratitude rather than carping about the past. Accepting what is and moving forward.
Darling husband cautiously received my belated apology for EngagementRing Gate, and has only joked about it once. So far.
If so, that’s what my Mum cast over my life, leaving a trail of constructive kindness and unconditional acceptance.
Not to mention whimsical remnants of 1940s teen slang such as “I’m all gog-wozzled” when she was overwhelmed, confused, tired, temporarily deranged. With six children under the age of eight, she often was.
I shared Mum with five siblings, numerous nieces and nephews, grand-children and great-grandchildren, cousins, great-nieces and nephews, friends – the list goes on. And her long, bright shadow shone on us all.
Happy first heavenly Mother’s Day Mum. We sure do miss you down here.
