65 Roses and a Trunki

Hospital and Hustling

Another door. Another knock.

The doctor comes in without waiting to be invited. That's the prerogative of the powerful, to come and go as they please.

– How's your coughing been?

I want to answer, then the coughing comes again in gravelly waves, making me retch.

– Not very good then, he says.

Overwhelmed and struck dumb, I look at him like a coughing corpse in an overacted daytime TV drama. I want to say I'm sorry. For the coughing and the drama. But words can't fight their way through gravel. The coughing comes and goes in sharp waves. Outside, the Melbourne sun beats through the windows. It wasn't supposed to be like this. After Taiwan, I'd arrived in Australia with Bec, my girlfriend, to travel along the East Coast starting with the Great Ocean Road. We bought a battered Mazda camper van with a pop-up roof and a blue streak on the side in the hope it lived long enough to make the journey. As it turned out, its life expectancy felt longer than mine after the doctor said to me:

– It's pseudomonas …

The sick and wounded have words we like and words we hate. For a cancer patient, remission and palliative sit neatly on opposite poles of a prognosis, as do lucky and amputation for a wounded soldier or thankfully and sorry for those saved the burden of grief or forced to carry it. For me, the best word was normal and the worst was pseudomonas, the bacteria that destroyed my sister's lungs.

– That explains your coughing.

I want to tell him I know but I can't. ...