Читать книгу Standing Up - Vicki Steggall - Страница 10

Prelude

I’m racing down Flemington Road in the back of an intensive care ambulance. Faces loom over me, kind questions are asked, but my brain keeps replaying the meeting I have just ruined by collapsing part way through. I’m annoyed to think that it’s now receding into the distance behind me. My addled brain sees it in terms of distance and geography, but what’s really happening is that, along with the rest of my life, it’s receding into time. It’s becoming another era and it will be years before I’m back.

I had a dizzy spell. There have been others, each dramatic but not serious. I’m 62, have moderately raised blood pressure, controlled by tablets and exercise, plus all the usual stresses. That fact that this meeting meant a lot to me no doubt triggered the dizziness. I had been presenting an idea at the Royal Children’s Hospital to boost research into a rare neurological disorder called Angelman Syndrome, a syndrome affecting my grandson, so I was understandably anxious.

Instead, rather dramatically, I’m leaving as a potential neurological patient myself.

When the paramedic speaks kindly, gratitude for this stranger flows over me, calming my cycle of fear and aggravation. But when I look up he seems to have disappeared, along with the interior of the ambulance.

I’ve spent my life being independent, bringing up my daughters and creating a business that takes me around the world consulting to large corporations. I’m on the board of the Bionic Ear Institute (now the Bionics Institute). I’m a mother, a grandmother and about to take on an activist role in an area of children’s health.

And yet here I am, strapped to a trolley, swaying nauseatingly in an ambulance, being rushed to the emergency department. Someone’s hand holds mine. From the Children’s Hospital to the Royal Melbourne Hospital is only a kilometre, but it seems to be taking a lot longer.

Really, I don’t have time for this.

23 August 2011