It all started when someone told my friend, “You’re so lucky to have a disabled permit. You must save so much on parking!” Understandably, she really let fly. But it got me thinking – I do love my disabled parking permit. And so the challenge was on. The benefits of having MS? Everyone’s different but here are my personal top ten.
The other side of Anzac
Recently I heard the story of an American social worker whose job in the 1990s was to scour the mountains of Alaska, seeking the bolt-holes of Vietnam veterans who had decided to remove themselves from society, living off the land in isolated shacks. In the 20 years since the Vietnam War, more and more American vets had come to the grim realisation that they were now unable to coexist with their families and friends; to hold down jobs; to partake in society in any meaningful way.
Post-traumatic stress disorder. PTSD.
The social worker’s task was to bring the vets into Anchorage to live in a halfway house and receive psychological therapy until they were willing and able to re-enter society. Of the degree of his success, I’m not sure.
Time to lay it on the table
My friend – I’ll call her Jane – was at the bottom of the driveway as I was leaving to take the dogs out one day. She’d just pulled up.
‘It’s time,’ she said, climbing out of her 4WD and crossing the road. ‘Some people know, and some people think they know, and there’s all kinds of Chinese whispers going on. It’s time to lay it on the table.’
I’ve stopped driving
I’ve stopped driving. Funnily, or not, the impetus happened one day when I almost didn’t stop. I was heading towards the turnoff out of Quaama onto the Princes Highway, saw a car coming from the north, went to brake… no response. Went to brake again… still rolling down towards the highway. Looked down to check where foot was: not on brake. Planted foot on brake, stopped car just before give way sign.
Reclaim the “boat people”
In 1991 I was 25, a B.Sc under my belt, a brand new sales rep at a medical company in North Ryde, NSW. I was to meet with medical professionals in major hospitals and sell them consumables for kidney dialysis, including bloodlines – the tubing sets that take blood from patients, pump it through artificial kidneys and return it, purified. At my new company these tubing sets were assembled in a small factory downstairs, and the CEO deemed it necessary for me to spend a few days becoming familiar with their production before I was sent out to sell them.
It was thus I found myself, one morning, a cleanroom gown and elastic shoe covers over my smart suit and heels, my neat blonde bob in a hairnet, at a big, white, laminated table. I was surrounded by women from the Subcontinent and the Middle East chattering in various languages over the hum of the laminar airflow system while gluing lengths of medical-grade PVC tubing to drip-chambers, injection sites, T- and Y-pieces according to diagrammatic instructions on charts in front of them.
Having mastered my task of applying a smear of glue and attaching a short length of tubing to a drip-chamber, I turned to the middle-aged woman to my left. I learned that her name was Salma. She had arrived in Australia two years previously with her husband and daughter. They were refugees from Afghanistan.
Does my brain look small in this?
I was crossing the Princes Highway the other day on my mobility scooter, opposite the south exit to Quaama, my village. The speed limit on the highway there is 100kph. But I have a big, all-terrain scooter which can do 15kph on the flat, and the highway is only two lanes, and there’s good visibility in both directions. In my mirror I noticed a four-wheel drive waiting behind me, then I took off. The four-wheel drive overtook me on the other side of the road but then stopped at the village store, where I caught up with it.
‘Whoa!’ the driver said. ‘We were really worried! From where we were, we couldn’t see if there was anything coming, then off you went!’
I get a lot of compliments
I get a lot of compliments. It all started when I got a walking stick.
“What a lovely cardigan!”
“Oh, thanks!” Nice, I thought. What a nice person. I should be like that, handing out compliments like flowers to strangers.
But then they started coming thick and fast, and it hit me: it’s the stick! You see me, young(ish) – well, not elderly by any means – walking with a stick. You feel sympathy; you want to make my day just a little less hellish than it clearly is. You don’t have a flower so you hand me a compliment instead.
Cobargo Folk Festival 2015 Highlights
Friday Afternoon
I might have gushed a little last year about Canadian guitarist-singer-songwriter Scott Cook, so when I heard he was back I went along to make sure. In 2014 he was a last-minute entry and they stuffed him into the tiny Narira shed up the back, where a heads-upped crowd sweltered through a heart-on-sleeve set of blues, folk and country, more than tinged with sardonic enviro-politics. We loved him then, and we loved him again in 2015, when the organisers got wise and put him on the main Gulaga stage. At least it was a lot cooler.
On walking
I used to be a fast walker. The men I walked with had to ask me to slow down. I left everyone in my wake.
One day in 2001 as I crossed Church St in Bega, striding out across the old cobblestone gutter and onto the blacktop in my jeans and shirt and RM Williams boots, feeling sturdy and strong, I told myself, “One day you’ll remember this.” And I do, I hold that memory like a precious jewel. “Walking, walking, walking,” I told myself that day. “Just walking”.
Now as I step out to cross Church St, the cobblestones have become a trap for my stick and the blacktop an expanse to be covered one unsteady step at a time.
Richard Denniss: Whatever happened to just in case?
The world’s sluggish response to climate change is a mystery to many. After all, overwhelming evidence of a problem usually results in mitigation of the problem. Witness the global response when scientists suggested in the 1990s that chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) might be busting a hole in the ozone layer, leading to high rates of skin cancer, amongst other consequences. The reaction was swift; CFCs were banned from aerosol cans. In America, consumers voluntarily switched away from aerosol sprays, resulting in a 50% loss in sales even before legislation was enforced.
Continue reading Richard Denniss: Whatever happened to just in case?