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...education, sport player and administrator), government policy (at both federal and state level) and much else. The only major experiential gap in that time was that I had never spent any length of time, as a patient at any rate, in an Australian hospital. Indeed, in the politically turbulent 1970s, I was much nearer to spending time in prison than in hospital, though that, too, was avoided.
That was ended on a Monday in late 2002 when, at 8.45 a.m., on my way to work, I fell off a bus, knocking myself out. The last thing I remember seeing was the pavement of my home city's main street rising towards me and hearing a lady saying, "I used to be a nurse; you've had a stroke." Another person in the same bus queue that I had so ungraciously joined called an ambulance, but that and what happened at that point and after are all but conjecture. However, it appears that within minutes I was in the casualty ward of the city's major teaching hospital where, I am told, I repaid the kindness of all those involved by having a quite spectacular epileptic fit. From the ambulance on, I, as the nineteenth-century novelists have it, knew no more, and am relying on reports.
Some days later, of which, once again, I knew nothing, I found myself in a rehabilitation hospital. Of that part, I need to say one thing: a friend, a clinical psychologist, visited me at an early stage, and told me that a secondary symptom of stroke was hallucinations. It also appeared that the drug which I had been given to treat the fit had, as a side effect, hallucinations; so that, in effect, a double dose of hallucinations resulted--bad enough of itself. But when a continuous diet of uniformly execrable Australian daytime television is added, it creates a uniquely disturbing and potent psychological mix.
Of the first four weeks or so in that second hospital, I need say relatively little. It appeared that the stroke (not the daytime television) had seriously affected my sense of balance with the effect that I suffered a few quite nasty falls (one nurse was apparently heard to say that I was doing it deliberately to prove...
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Candide's way.(world past, present- better or worse)(Column), October 01, 2005
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