I touch down in Melbourne around 8.30am on March 2 and it’s a chilly 18’C.
My brother Graeme and his partner, Kiyoe are there to meet me and we drive straight from the airport to mum’s place in the pretty Victorian town of Nagambie, about an hour and half’s drive north of Melbourne.
It’s not her birthday until Saturday but she has a specialist appointment today and we are her chaperones.
Graeme is a qualified Myotherpist and has a degree in Chinese Medicine as well as a Grad Dip in Health Industry Management. Until recently, he has been employed as an administrator at a training college for Allied Health and Alternative Medicine practitioners. He’s a little concerned about the prospects of finding work if the coronavirus outbreak worsens, especially as he has a mortgage on a three bedroom unit he purchased several years ago. He is considering turning one of the rooms into a clinic. He is an excellent person to oversee mum’s well being and healthcare and both he and Kiyoe have been actively involved in assisting her since I’ve been spending more time overseas.
Kiyoe is a nurse who trained in Japan and who dotes over mum, and is similarly adored.
We arrive at mum’s place and I’m pleased to see that she looks well but she has lost a little weight since I last saw her.
She has never been overweight but has a bit of a sweet tooth.
Don’t ever leave her unattended near the supermarket ice cream cabinet!
Her specialist appointment is in Shepparton another 45 minutes north of here and we need to press on.
About three years ago, Mum developed a skin irritation on the knuckle of her right index finger, which she thought was caused by absent-mindedly rubbing her thumb and thumbnail against the knuckle. It became a open sore, which she kept wrapped for a time but the condition worsened rather than improved. Eventually someone suggested it be checked by a specialist.
The diagnosis was cancer.
Unfortunately a skin cancer on a knuckle is hard to remove and the only solution was to remove the whole finger.
It was a traumatic experience for an 82 year old woman but she eventually learned to write again and even to sew, using what I like to call her f*** you finger. (Make a fist and then raise the second finger from your thumb in the air – Yes, that’s what she did!)
She remained cancer-free for about 18 months and was receiving regular, three monthly check-ups from the excellent team at the Peter Macallum Cancer Clinic in Melbourne. But the cancer reappeared in the top knuckle of her second finger and from one check-up to the next, it had spread to her lung.
The appointment today is to check-in with one of her specialists at a regional branch of the Peter Mac network and to receive an ongoing treatment, known as immunotherapy.
Without going into too much detail, immunotherapy is a cancer treatment developed in Australia that bolsters the body’s immune response and increases the body’s ablity to attack cancer cells head on. It doesn’t work for everyone but the main benefit, especially for people of mum’s age, is that it has far less debilitating side effects than more established treatments such as chemotherapy and radiotherapy.
Talking to mum on the way up in the car it appears that her treatment is causing no major side effects apart from occasional nausea and she is feeling no pain or discomfort in her lungs. Still it’s clear that that while she’s trying to “just go with it” she’s a bit overwhelmed, not only with her own issues but with what she’s seeing on the nightly news. Donald Trump and his devestatingly irresponsible response to the coronavirus epidemic are not intrinsically linked at this point but to one elderly lady, both are leading indicators of a world she no longer understands nor feels she has any control over.
She says as much to her specialist, Dr Sahu, a young, Indian gentleman, brimming with empathy and data.
He holds her by the hand as he says, “I can see your treatment is going very well. Yes, you have some cancer on your lung but your own immune system is fighting it very well. Try not to be anxious. Don’t be too concerned by what you are seeing on the TV. Focus on your your health. That is what is important here. And don’t forget to eat. I can see that you’re not eating”.
To mum, he is healing personified and he can hold her hand forever if he wants. But the good doctor has a carousel of patients to see and as quickly as our visit begins, it is bought to an end.
“I will see you again in three months”, says the empathetic, young doctor. “Rememember what I told you. And good luck with your treatment.”
That night we all stay at Graeme’s place and in the morning we travel to the Peter Macallum Cancer Clinic in Melbourne for scans and hopefully, an update on how Mum’s treatment is progressing.
The prognosis turns out to be very good.
Two of the three spots on her lung are gone completely and the one remaining spot looks to have decreased in size.
A great outcome and amazing to think how medical science can now treat and manage a disease that only a few years ago was considered as good as a death sentence.
Hopefully, they have as much success with the new virus.
After a busy first two days in Australia we make it back to Nagambie and bid farewell until Saturday, to Graeme and Kiyoe.
As we sit down to watch the evening news, I check my emails and find the following update from Toby:
G’day,
So things have accelerated somewhat.
After flagging the whole cornavirus thing for a meeting last week, I reckon we should have jumped on it as soon as I thought of it. But we had a meeting with the brains trust today.
There’s a run on toilet paper. There’s none at Coles, Richmond. Unbelievable. A lot of corporates around us have given their workers the all clear to work from home. This could be a factor. I’ve placed an order for 20 boxes of jumbo shit tickets tomorrow from CP packaging. Fingers crossed. I’m stocking up on latex gloves too.
There’s also a run on hand sanitiser. We’re looking at bulk 20L drums. Some merchants have pushed the price up to $500 for a drum, gouging. Some other suppliers haven’t cottoned on and it’s at $120 a drum still. Failing that we have researched a recipe.
It’s handy having trainee nurses working for us. We had a pow-wow today. To kill the virus, hand sanitiser needs to be 60 per cent alcohol. Temperature 60′-70’C we think so the glass washer should be alright.
We’re gonna have a staff meeting on Thursday. Gotta change the way we do things. Heaps more hand sanitising with the good stuff. No more squeezing fruit in drinks or tea towels on our back pockets. We’ll keep the outer toilet doors open and sanitise handles, tills and other points of contact multiple times a day. Touching our faces is a no-no, so we’ll institute a fun way to remind each other not to do things.
At the end of the day, staff are going to be the first ones to cop it if it gets out of hand and we don’t take steps. Moreover, the pub can be a vector for disease if we’re not on the ball. We’re conjuring ways to bring the pub to people’s homes via delivery if it does go full ghost town.
We don’t want to loudly bang on about things as we don’t want to put people off, but we need to be ready to escalate our response to things so as to make punters feel secure about coming to the pub. We want to be just slightly behind the 8 ball with responses.
In happier news, I reckon I’ve got the pizza section down pat today. Nath conjured up this vegan mushroom pizza with 3 different sorts of mushies, marinated tofu, camphire, tarragon. The absolute bomb, did heaps today. Good times.
Good times. That’s one way of looking at it.