Some positive news quickly led to the extraordinary experience of a stay in hospital. This blog, A Pain in the Poo Factory, tells the story Santha, my GP in Castlemaine, had some positive news for me. The poo test I’d done was positive. In fact it was so positive that she would book me in for […]
The double and triple agents: deaf people in history
What did deaf people really think of the tight control of their community of 100 years ago? And what was it like for deaf gays and lesbians at the time? We really don’t know. Not yet. I have been at the State Library of Victoria, browsing through old copies of the publication of what was […]
Needledum and Needledee
A Pain in the Poo Factory 07 I must have been about four or five years old when my mother took me into a building in Canterbury road, in Canterbury, in the inner-eastern suburbs of Melbourne. It was probably a church hall. It was loud and noisy; steel filing drawers slammed and footsteps and heels […]
The bullet holes
A Pain in the Poo Factory 07 Emma changed my dressings. Considering that in theory I was opened right up, it was unbelievable that there were just four bandages. The largest one was in the middle of my belly near my navel, and the centre of a blaze of colour, like a fiery desert sunset. […]
Code Blue
A Pain in the Poo Factory 06 A smiling Malaysian doctor looked down at me as she adjusted my oxygen mask. “Do you know where you are,” she asked. I was bathed in gentle morning sunshine on a lovely little palm-fringed beach on Xanadu. Olivia Newton-John cradled me in her arms, her eyes brimming with […]
The hook-up
A Pain in the Poo Factory 05 Cathy told me later they wanted to speak to me while I was in recovery. I had appeared lucid, and they’d handed me my cochlear implant, hoping I would put it on. Apparently I’d gazed at it a few moments and flaked out again. That’s when they called […]