The nocturnal light from South Head Lighthouse flickering past the building at five-second intervals also seemed to affect the fish for, strangely, it would sometimes cause a fish to go stir-crazy and take an amazing and non-typical leap right out of the tank to where Mr Schmoo was waiting below to scoop it up.
But soon, despite a great many setbacks, Damon’s fish tank settled down and added to his wellbeing. It became a thing of beauty and wonderment to anyone who liked that sort of thing, which wasn’t a lot of people.
The last two-thirds of 1988 was proving to be good for Damon, though Celeste recalls little things were starting to add up despite Damon’s totally positive attitude. By early 1989 the AZT, that is, the drug intended to slow the progress of the AIDS, was proving to be enormously debilitating. While it seemed to be working well with Tim, it was causing Damon to become anaemic. Furthermore, the nausea it caused him was becoming very severe so that he was constantly on a strong anti-nausea pill, Maxolon.
This proved to be a twofold problem for Damon. He was growing paler and paler each day with less and less energy from the anaemia brought on by the AZT. As well, he suffered from a very rare reaction to the nausea pills which caused him, early in 1989, to throw a massive fit.
Adam was visiting at the time and Damon, in the middle of a sentence went suddenly rigid and seemed to throw himself at the floor. As Adam told it later, “He simply dropped like a stone and began to jerk, his body in a sort of foetal position jerking involuntarily, one leg kicking out, the other folded against his chest; his hands were turned inwards like the claws of a bird and his eyes were popping out. He was making a sort of gurgling noise as though he was fighting for breath or was choking or something. I was totally panicked and so was Celeste. We tried to hold him but he was too strong, the convulsive jerking just went on and on. I screamed to Celeste to call an ambulance and she rushed to get the phone book and then just stood there holding it, not knowing what to do. I couldn’t think either. ‘Look under “A",’ I kept shouting, ‘Celeste, look under “A"!’ Which was of course stupid, but we were both paralysed by fear and couldn’t think to look in the front of the phone book. Celeste suddenly dropped the book and rushed out of the front door.
“I panicked, ‘Don’t leave me, don’t leave me with Damon!’ I cried. But she’d gone and I could hear her jumping the steps two at a time and then, through the open door, I heard her banging both fists against the landlord’s door, yelling, ‘Steve! Steve!’ I stayed with Damon, who was still jerking and gurgling, and I tried to hold him, but he just kept fitting and I thought his eyes were going to pop out of his head and that he was going to die. ‘Please God, don’t let my brother die!’ I kept shouting.
“Celeste must have managed to explain it to Steve who called an ambulance which arrived soon afterwards.
“The ambulance took Damon to the Prince of Wales hospital and we followed in the Mazda. The ambulance men must have told the doctor in Emergency that Damon had AIDS, though I can’t recall either of us telling them. This was the first time we realised that AIDS could be a bit of a red herring. Damon was coming out and then fitting again every few minutes and, even when he was out of a fit, his entire body trembled as though a strong electric current was running throughhim or he was terribly cold. They started to make tests, giving him all the usual things to stop fits in AIDS patients, but these drugs all proved negative.”
The doctors at Prince of Wales, who had no history of Damon, had been trying to contact Damon’s palliative specialist only to discover that he didn’t have one. Amazingly, they didn’t ask Celeste about the drugs he’d been taking, assuming that Damon was gay and neither Celeste nor his brother would know about his medication. Finally, towards midnight, six and a half hours after he’d started fitting, Celeste asked the doctor if he thought the fits could have been caused by any of the drugs Damon was taking. “Yes, of course,” the doctor replied curtly, “that’s why we’ve been trying to get hold of his palliative regimen.”
“But I know them all,” Celeste said.
The doctor looked astonished. “You mean you know the drugs he’s on, their actual names? What about the dosages?”
“Of course!” Celeste named them, some eight or nine, and the frequency and amounts Damon usually took. When she got to Maxolon the doctor jumped, “Anti-nausea? It’s unusual for it to have side effects, but not unknown. It’s worth a try!” In fact, Maxolon was the culprit. Damon’s fit was not something brought about by AIDS at all, but because he was one of the very rare people who reacted badly to Maxolon.
Damon, however, persisted with AZT despite the problems, not the least being the anaemia. He reasoned that he could cope with the anaemia and the constant nausea if the end result was the retardation of AIDS itself. He’d get paler and frailer until all the energy seemed to have leaked out of him and his red blood cell count was down to seven or less, which seemed to occur over a period of about two weeks. When this stage arrived he’d go into hospital, returning to Denise at the Haemophilia Centre for a whole blood transfusion and staying at the Centre all day. He’d arrive home at night with rosy cheeks, full of energy, the miracle of the gift of blood he’d been given, a new Damon, seemingly even strong enough to ignore the profound effects the AZT treatment was having on him.
But then at breakfast one morning, without any warning, Damon started to have a problem breathing. He was suddenly gulping for breath, clasping his chest and finding it difficult to breathe. “I…c…can’t…bre…eathe,” he gasped, dropping the piece of toast he was holding.
Celeste wrapped a blanket around him, even though it was a bright and sunny March morning, bundled him into the car and drove to Prince Henry, where he was admitted immediately to Marks Pavilion, the AIDS section of the hospital, and was given oxygen.
This time his problem wasn’t hard to diagnose. This was the first incident in Damon’s overall prognosis that clearly fitted the AIDS pattern – he was suffering from Pneumocystis carinii. Millions of little organisms had filled his lungs and threatened to slowly suffocate him. Pneumocystis carinii caused a type of pneumonia so rare that most people in the medical profession hadn’t heard of it. It is a microbe which can grow only when the immune system has been depleted, that is, when there are no longer sufficient numbers of T-cells to stop it from growing in its most preferred ecological niche, the human lung. Today, this rare infection, caused by one of the thousands of malevolent micro-organisms that perpetually lurk on the fringes of human existence, is one of the commonest signs that AIDS is starting to take effect. It is now so typical that it is usually referred to, simply, as AIDS-related pneumonia or PCP.
AIDS-related pneumonia brought Damon into Marks Pavilion, the AIDS ward at Prince Henry Hospital, for the first time. Here he saw people who were much more sick than he was. Later he was to describe this first visit to me.
“They put an oxygen mask over me and I was soon able to breathe more freely and after a while I was able to look around. I was in a small room with a man in the bed opposite me who looked like he belonged in a horror movie. His head was shaven and he was skeletal, his mouth sucked in, eyes deep in their sockets, he couldn’t have weighed more than four stone. He looked about a hundred years old and I learned later he was twenty-five. He was just a bag of bones in a bag of old skin! It was a terrible shock, like seeing yourself dying, seeing where you could be going, looking further down the path. It was awful and what with my breathing and the pain in my lungs I became terribly depressed. This was the first time I’d thought of myself as someone in a group. Someone in a category, someone other people saw as dying, or in the process of dying, no longer an individual, not Damon Courtenay – just a terminal disease eating at me while I waited for the end to come.”
In the beginning, AIDS-related pneumonia had killed a great many people and, when it wasn’t treated immediately, it still accounted for quite a few deaths. But Celeste had caught it early and Damon’s treatment was swift and efficient; using very strong antibiotics
it was arrested quickly. Nevertheless he was in hospital for nearly a month and it was not inconceivable that he might have died had it been left for a couple of days, as often happened. That’s the very point about AIDS. Anything can come along once the T-cell barrier is down. Opportunistic infections exist around us in their tens of thousands and often death can occur swiftly and with little warning.
The AIDS block was divided into two sections. Downstairs was used for those patients, like Damon, who were in the early stages of the disease and still relatively strong. Upstairs, the advanced patients were nursed. Some of these would not return home or would do so simply to die. Damon had arrived when the downstairs section had been full and they’d temporarily placed him upstairs, in a bed where a patient had died only an hour before. It was here that he’d seen for the first time how the disease ravaged its victims and he was never to completely recover from this initial shock.
Damon now knew that he was in very serious trouble, that the fight which lay ahead of him was going to be an horrendous one. He’d suffered the toxic effects of AZT, the dreadful months of nausea, the fitting caused by the Maxolon, which had occurred again on two subsequent occasions, and none of this had prevented his disease from progressing to PCP, the next stage of AIDS. He lay with the oxygen mask over his face, tears rolling down his cheeks, when he heard a voice.
“Hello, Damon, I’m Rick Osborne, the senior nurse.”
Damon looked up, hardly able to see through his tears. A small, slim man in his late thirties with a cheerful open face was looking down at him and smiling. “Hello,” Damon said, his voice muffled in the mask. He tried to offer his hand, but seemed suddenly too tired and weak to lift it.
“I can’t have you staying here, it’s much too depressing,” the chap named Rick said. “If you don’t mind sharing a room downstairs I can squeeze you in. The guy in it leaves tomorrow and then it’s all yours, I promise.” He looked around in a conspiratorial way and then leaned over to whisper into Damon’s ear. “Please don’t worry, you’re a long way from where he is. We’ll have you better quite soon. You’ve got PCP, it’s a sort of pneumonia, but we’ll knock that on the head in no time!” He pulled himself away again and stood up, fussing a little and straightening the sheet around Damon’s chest. “Now, what do you say we get the hell out of here, hey?”
Rick, like most of the male nurses in the AIDS section at Prince Henry, was gay himself, but he immediately understood that Damon was not and was sensitive to the fact that coming into an AIDS ward without any previous warning must be a terrible shock to him. Most patients arrived knowing more or less what to expect from having visited friends in the past.
Rick was originally a kid from Crookwell, a small country town famous for cattle and potatoes. Although he’d long since lost many of his country ways, he still responded in an open and friendly manner and it was difficult not to be charmed by him. As he once explained to me, his family was no big deal, they owned a small holding. Although it wasn’t much, his father wanted his son to inherit it and to be another generation on the land, to hunt and ride and take over from him as he had done from his father. At eight he’d put a .22 rifle in Rick’s hands and one early morning they’d gone hunting.
Rick recalled this incident with a wry grin. “It was early morning and a bit misty the way it is in the country. Our boots were making a crunchy sound on the frosty grass as we walked across an open, well-cropped paddock. Suddenly my Dad was pointing and whispering, ‘There, next to the burnt stump, a real big ‘un!’
“I looked in the direction he was pointing and there was a rabbit seated on its hind legs both paws over its nose like something out of a Beatrix Potter book. He was a big Jack with a white chest and grey markings. My heart started to beat faster; I didn’t want to kill him, but I was afraid of what my Dad would think. I lifted the rifle and fired, taking no aim at all. The rabbit jumped and started to run and then I heard my old man shout, ‘Good shot, son!’ He must not have seen the look of horror on my face for he clapped me on the back, pushing me forward. ‘Quick, it’s a leg shot. Don’t let the bugger get to the burrow!’
“I’d wounded the rabbit, which had run a few feet and collapsed and then had started to drag itself away, its hind leg shattered. The push from my father had propelled me forward and I continued running towards the big Jack still clutching the rifle. When I got to where it lay, I remember there was a slick of blood on the short, frosty grass for several feet where the big Jack had dragged its smashed leg before finally collapsing. I wanted to be sick on the spot and fought back the need to gag. It was still alive, its bright eyes looking up at me. Suddenly I wasn’t afraid any more and I knew just what to do; I put the rifle on the ground and bent down and picked the rabbit up and hugged it, not caring about the blood on my shirt or what my mum would say when we got home.
“Then I picked the rifle up and hooked the strap over my shoulder and set off to where my Dad was standing. I could feel the morning sun on my face and the rapid heartbeat of the small creature through my shirt. My Dad was standing with the sun directly behind him so that his face was in shadow and I couldn’t see his expression.
“’Look what I’ve done,’ I held the rabbit out in front of me not knowing what to expect. ‘I’ve got to make it better, Dad.’
“As I drew closer I could now see the expression on my dad’s face and he was smiling, a small smile just there at the corners of his mouth. ‘You’ll never make a killer, son,’ he said gently. ‘But that’s all right, the world has enough of those already.’
“We took the big Jack home and my dad must have talked to Mum because she wasn’t a bit cranky about my blood-stained shirt. I put a splint on the rabbit’s shattered leg. It soon got better but I guess I was a lousy doctor, it always hopped sort of lopsided and funny and my mum named it Cassidy, after Hop-a-long Cassidy.” Rick grinned. “Cassidy got very fat and became a family pet and stayed around the place for years, a tough knockabout sort of rabbit, who, if he’d been a bloke would have been a real larrikin.
“I think that very morning when I shot Cassidy was when I knew I was, well, you know, not like the other boys at school and that I wanted to be a nurse when I grew up. Though I must say, in fairness, my dad seemed to understand and he never gave me a hard time or made me feel he was disappointed in me because I wasn’t tough or aggressive. We simply never went shooting again.”
From the very first day Rick treated Damon as being different and special and they became great friends. Later he was to play a vital role in nursing him through the many crises he would face with AIDS. Rick Osborne was a gift from a generous God and, of all the many nurses who were kind and helpful to Damon and to whom we are enormously grateful, it is to Tim Rigg and Rick Osborne and, a little later in Damon’s illness, Lindsay Haber, that we owe the greatest debt of gratitude. They, along with Denise at the Haemophilia Centre, whom we loved very dearly, were the angels in white, the selfless people who always gave more, much more, than could be reasonably expected of them.
This had always been true; from the very beginning, the male doctors in Damon’s life were a decidedly mixed bag; some few were great but, for the most part, they were arrogant, often callous and unthinking and sometimes downright stupid. But the hundreds of angels in white or blue, the sisters and the nurses that filled his life were, with perhaps the exception of a dozen or so old harridans, wonderful, caring people, filled with laughter, commonsense and compassion.
As Damon grew a little better he became quite impressed with Prince Henry Hospital. At Marks Pavilion he had a breezy room looking out over Little Bay with its heathland and rocky coastline view where the sea rushed in to smash against the rocks and tear itself into creamy white foam. At times the spray, slow-motioning into a high white arc, became a paradoxical symbol; witnessed by the dying from their faraway windows, it was the epitome of life and energy and continuity. The AIDS block was clean and spacious with two television rooms, which always contained fresh flowers. The staff s
eemed casual and friendly, mostly greeting visitors after only one visit by their correct names. They had all volunteered to work in the AIDS section, which was often harder work and longer hours than in many other parts of the great hospital complex.
This was even more commendable as their job placed them constantly in the presence of men who were dying. They would watch a young man, perhaps in his early twenties, come in for the first time, looking strong and full of life, and they would know that they would eventually be present when he had become a frail and broken little creature in for the last time to quietly die.
To be an AIDS nurse takes a great deal of character and inner strength and even the best of them can’t maintain it for more than two or three years before they need to get away from the constant death around them. They have every right to be indifferent, to develop a protective, untouchable, emotional armour to survive, yet they do no such thing. Perhaps because most of the male nurses were in the gay community, they brought a kind of dedication and compassion to their job and, in the process, they have become a special breed of men who exemplify everything that is good about our society.
Damon preferred Prince Henry because the AIDS section was separate and completely away from the other wards. In any other hospital in which he’d been treated, he’d felt that people were looking at him, that the general staff saw him as a young homosexual with AIDS. And while Damon never thought of himself as particularly straight and I never ever heard him make a negative judgment of someone who had contracted AIDS in a different manner than he, he wasn’t anxious to be thought of as gay. In a person like Damon this was somewhat strange, as normally he wouldn’t have given a thought to how strangers might perceive him. But I think his need to be seen as heterosexual came about because of his love for Celeste. He felt perhaps that if people saw him as gay it somehow depreciated their relationship. I have no doubt this was an over-reaction and not entirely logical, but it is understandable. Damon was very young and inexperienced, even in sex, and certainly he was unaccustomed to the ways and, in particular, to the casual sexual banter and conversation which epitomised many of the people in the gay community.
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