Chapter Four
Inevitably, Felix and I were rostered on to a lot of shifts together – because the roster had been written back when we’d specifically requested to have most of our shifts together, before he went and cheated on me.
What this meant was that every day at work was a game of avoidance.
Where could I go to ensure that I didn’t cross paths with Felix?
How long could I avoid food so I didn’t find myself in the tea room with him?
I knew that my feelings would be harder to make sense of if I saw him, so for now, the safest way was just not to let it happen.
I entertained the idea of moving back home to Sydney.
After all, I had no ties to Hobart. It was winter – cold and drizzly – and I had no friends or family here.
But the reality was, even if I was ready to leave Felix for good, the blow to my training would be too much.
My career was one of the few things that seemed to be going okay, so its forward progress was something I put a lot of weight on.
The ‘Granny Flat’ situation (whose inverted commas I could now entirely appreciate) was not going so well, all in all.
Vivian was a kind and joyful person who it was hard to be irritated with – I mean, she was irritating as hell, but I didn’t feel she was deserving of my irritation.
She invited me for chai daily. She sang while she gardened or hung out the washing.
She was learning how to play the violin with true child-like enthusiasm, and she had multiple friends over each day, who would spend hours and hours with her, laughing away while smoking joints in the backyard.
She was living her best life and I’d agreed to rent her cheap shed. Who was I to complain?
But it had been two weeks and my sleep debt was worse than it had ever been.
My breakup with Felix had left my cortisol levels high and I was stressed, confused, hurt and lost. It didn’t help that my internal barriers to sleep were superseded by the relentless noises of Vivian’s space.
I considered asking her to pull down the wind chimes but they seemed to give her so much joy, and with the budget rent, I didn’t feel I had much leverage for requests.
And the dogs … well, what could I expect to do about them?
Have them debarked? Ask her to sell them?
It was a situation I had gotten myself into and it was up to me to handle it.
I was looking at alternative accommodation options all the time, but there was nothing even remotely in my price range.
I had a HECS debt the size of Mt Wellington; large sums of money that kept disappearing in mandatory courses and trainings every few months; I was saving up to one day be in a position to own my own place; and I was sending top-ups to Ebony, who was raising her three kids on Centrelink.
I dreamed of getting my Emergency Fellowship and earning proper money, of moving back home and owning a place I could share with Ebony and my niece and nephews.
A place full of joy and love. Security and safety.
She’d be the dependable mum, I’d be the financial security.
Together we’d create the home we never had growing up.
But getting there relied on me completing this term in Hobart, not making any massive fuck-ups at work and passing my final exams, the study for which was going as ineffectually as you might expect from attempts to perform CPR on a dead fish.
I thought my run of nights was going to be the solution.
I wasn’t sleeping anyway – may as well work in the night and perhaps I’d be so tired I’d fall asleep in the day.
This was probably an indication of my malfunctioning brain, because I really couldn’t have been more wrong.
If I thought sleeping at night was difficult, sleeping during the day was virtually impossible.
The dogs were more excitable, the wind blew the wind chimes harder, the little girl next door jumped and squealed on the trampoline from three fifteen to five o’clock every afternoon and the walls of my tin shed were so. Fucking. Thin.
When I arrived to do my third night of four, I was Medical Officer in Charge – in other words, responsible for the whole goddamn Derwent Emergency Department – and I was seriously freaking out.
I never got sick. I never called in sick.
But I was getting to the point where it was beginning to feel I might actually be unsafe to work, such was my level of sleep deprivation.
‘You look like fucking shit.’ Cleo plonked herself down on a chair in the handover room. I didn’t know Cleo well at all and I’d not seen her since our shift swap a few weeks earlier, but she was one of those very friendly, personable types.
‘Thank you.’ I refreshed the department list on the computer screen.
‘Like seriously.’ She was looking at me with a slightly worried expression. ‘Are you ill?’
‘I’m fine. I’m not sleeping well, that’s all.’
She raised her eyebrows. ‘You know, it’s actually okay to call in sick if you’re not feeling well,’ she said.
‘I’m not sick. I’m fine.’
‘This is why doctors get burnt out – because we all think we have to be superhuman. You’re, like, pasty as fuck.’
‘Again. Thanks.’
‘Call in sick. Ted can be in charge. Go home.’
‘I’m here now. It would be a real bitch thing to go home without any warning.’
‘Tough tits! That’s life.’
‘I appreciate it, but I’m really okay.’ I was. I could be. I was strong and I was hard working. That was enough, right?
We did the handover and I felt ready for the night ahead. I was nearly ready to function, the adrenaline stepping in, charging me like a dead battery.
The room emptied again and I walked to the in-charge seat on the flight deck. Just as I was sitting down, Cleo flopped down beside me.
‘Hey, I start my nights day after tomorrow. Why don’t you let me return the favour from the other week and I’ll take tomorrow night for you? I’m a good day sleeper and I don’t mind doing an extra.’
I suddenly felt extraordinarily weary. The idea that I wouldn’t have to put myself through this again tomorrow night seemed desperately appealing.
She could see me weighing it up and rolled her eyes. ‘Don’t overthink it. I’ll do you a deal: come for a drink with me at eight p.m. Then I’ll do your night shift.’
‘Do you regularly drink before a shift?’ This was genuinely concerning.
She rolled her eyes again. ‘I’m loose, but not that loose. I’ll have an orange juice. See you at the New Sydney, okay?’
She darted off, her sweet, musky perfume lingering in her wake. I felt my throat squeeze in a way it hadn’t in years.
Maybe there was kindness in the world.
Somehow, I did survive my night shift, and as the adrenaline dripped out of my system, the weight of my tiredness descended heavily. I slept deeply for about four hours until I was woken by Vivian’s violin playing. It wasn’t a pleasing way to wake up, to be frank.
The bathroom at Vivian’s was a shared situation, located at the back of her house and accessed from the outside, so it lent itself relatively well to the ‘Granny Flat’ resident to use without needing to enter the house.
I’d spent about an hour scrubbing it when I’d first moved in, so its standards of cleanliness were now passable.
After letting the steamy water run over me for a few minutes, I felt awake enough to think about what I needed to do. Like study. Like shop for food. Like call my mum.
‘Mary!’ Mum answered on the second ring and my How Is Mum?
barometer calmed. I could always tell almost immediately if things were going okay or not.
The finer details needed more time to unpack, but on the whole, a quick response, a bright and non-slurred greeting was enough to turn the major alarm bells off.
The barometer was in reassuring colours – greens and blues.
‘Hi Mum, how are you?’
‘Hi darling. Can’t talk long, but how are you down there?’
I filled her in on a few details, like how the weather had been and how busy the Derwent Hospital was. ‘What are you up to today?’ I asked.
‘I’m doing an art class! It starts in twenty minutes so I need to jump in the car really soon.
’ She told me about the class she’d started and how she was discovering watercolours.
She sounded passionate, distracted and slightly elevated.
These were the good times. The times when Mum was full of life.
Yet, there was something that still left me with a feeling of unease.
I knew the safety of her wellness was so brittle and the crash on the other side was inevitable.
Mum worked as a clerk in an emergency department where I grew up in Western Sydney.
She’d been through a lot of struggles, but she was pretty high functioning, all in all, and had managed to keep her job over the years.
My first memories of the hospital started when I was in primary school.
I was seven and Ebony was five. Our father was long gone and Mum didn’t have formal childcare so every afternoon was different – sometimes a friend would pick us up from school, or my grandma would take us to her house.
Sometimes Mum was off work and able to get us, and other days, when there was nowhere else for us to go, we’d end up dropped at her work to wait in the tea room until she finished her shift.