Category Archives: life

My dad’s been pretty sick lately.

Well, actually he had open heart surgery to remove a calcified valve and prevent a possible aortic rupture. His father had his first heart attack at 35 and a second one killed him when he wasn’t too much older than my dad is now; heart disease has been an elephant in the room that is Dad’s mind ever since.

He’s relatively young and healthy. The calcification is a congenital thing and miraculously, a five decade-long love affair with junk food hasn’t affected his arteries at all. Lucky bugger.

Still, having your chest cut open and your heart stopped for the better part of a day isn’t something you can brush off lightly. He started planning his escape as soon as he was conscious, but that was after a few days in intensive care with all manner of wires hooked up to him.

We were all worried about it, Mum the most. She and I deal with anxiety in the same ways – insomnia, yelling and ranting at people, a churning and aching stomach and occasionally, full-blown panic attacks. That said, Mum is at her best in crises, especially when it comes to Dad.

One Sunday afternoon when I was seven years old, a friend and I were watching a video in my room when my Mum came in and told us not to go in to the kitchen because she was mopping the floors. We were living in a farm house at that point and Mum spent a good portion of her day waging war against red dust. We told her we wouldn’t, but of course five minutes later, my friend wanted a glass of water.
I went into the kitchen and found my Dad on the floor moaning, semi-conscious and covered in blood. He’d been gored through the shoulder by a rogue bull and been dragged along a gravel road for kilometres. At this point, it’s worth mentioning that Dad is an accountant who had only been living in rural Queensland for 12 months. Mum, totally outwardly calm, had laid him on piles of clean towels, called the ambulance and then called a family friend who was a nurse, knowing she’d get there before the ambulance did.

Of course I screamed and cried, which of course made my 18-month-old brother scream and cry, but then my friend’s mum turned up and took us back to their place.

We hadn’t been living in Emerald long when that happened, but word soon got around that “the nice young bloke who runs the co-op has had an accident, you know they’re new to town and he has a wife and two little kids…”
Soon strangers were introducing themselves to Mum as knowing Dad through his job and ask if there was anything they could do. People offered to look after my brother and I while Mum sat with Dad in the hospital, pick me up from school, cook us dinner.  We found friends we didn’t even know we had.

Dad spent a few months in hospital and came out of the experience with a scar that gave him license to whine for a shoulder rub from any of his children any time he wanted. It’s fifteen years on from that and Mum’s learned a few things about handling small towns since. Dad’s a private person (sorry about this blogging thing, Dad) and didn’t want anyone to know about his surgery, but Mum didn’t agree.

“If you hide things in small towns, people will gossip and make it out to be worse than it is. If you’re honest, people will be kind,” she said, and let everyone who is important to our family know that things were going to be different for the next few months.

They came home last night after two weeks in Brisbane to find that one of Dad’s mates had got a gardening crew and turned our ragged two acres into a gorgeously manicured garden, knowing that Dad won’t be able to even sweep up leaves for months. Other friends fed and exercised our dogs and countless people had filled up his voicemail, Mum’s voicemail and the home answering machine with get-well-and-tell-me-if-there’s-anything-I-can-do messages.

He’s going to be ok, and now he has a scar on his torso to match the one on his shoulder. He says he feels like he’s been hit by a truck, but for a man who has already survived being hit by a bull, he’ll be back eating party pies and pouring scorn on idiots pretty soon.