11 Margaret’s Backstory Part 3: Anne Ryan’s Parting Gift – 13 September 2024

Within days of Margaret being given her death sentence in July 2020, I became deadly ill.  The main symptoms were an inability to breathe, a stomach that swelled up like a football and a cough that began to destroy the line of vertical line of stitches I had received when I had an open heart operation in November 2018.  There were other minor symptoms such as continuous hiccups and optical migraines, but in the scheme of things they were relatively unimportant.

For the final part of 2020, the symptoms came with great regularity but because I usually got only one symptom at a time – for example, an inability to breath or cough attack – I coped with this completely unexpected development.

I often walk in a National Park near Adelaide called Morialta Park.  It is rugged and phone coverage is patchy on a good day.  Because Morialta is not a good place in which to suddenly develop any health issues, I knew I was in deadly trouble one Sunday in 2020 when I was deep in the Park and developed an inability to breathe.  I would be dead before any ambulance crew could even locate me, so I concentrated on getting myself out of the Park.  I focused all of my attention on breathing in as much air as possible and then placing one foot in front of another.  I simply refused to stop walking and I refused to just allow myself to die.  Eventually, I got myself down to one of the car parks in Morialta.  When I tried to walk from the bench where I plonked myself down in exhaustion, I was unable to walk the mere 4 metres to the waiting car.  Anne Ryan was with me that day and said “If I ever find myself in a tight spot, I hope you are there.”

In February 2021, Anne Ryan became frightened by being in the company of the dying Margaret and cancelled both me and Margaret.  My symptoms then began a combined assault on my life.  The coughing usually woke me up at about 1.00 am every night.  I would then get out of bed and start Perimeter Prowling around our living room and kitchen.  About 30 minutes of Prowling usually calmed down the coughing and I could then doze upright on the sofa. 

I ceased being able to eat and my weight started dropping dramatically.  During my third and final period in hospital, my weight reached 73 kilos and my hospital lung function test said that I had only 43% of normal lung capacity.  During my first spell in hospital, the night duty nurse saved my life by coming into my room unannounced and placing me on continuous oxygen supply.  I remained on bottled oxygen for the next 12 hours continuously.  When Margaret visited me later that morning, I was hobbling through the corridor near the lifts.  She saw an aged, crippled old man and did not recognize that the aged, crippled old man was in fact her husband.

Margaret’s suffering was significantly increased by months of worrying whether she would outlive me.  From February 2021 until mid July 2021, it seemed certain that she would see me dead before the cancer killed her too.

Near the end of my final hospital stay, Dr Aiyappan diagnosed that my immune system was trying to kill a non existent enemy and in the absence of a genuine enemy, my immune system was doing its very best to kill me instead.  Since then, I have had regular injections to suppress my immune system and my body has stopped trying to kill itself.  With the help of the injections, I was able to help Margaret for the balance of her suffering and eventual death.  I still take the injections to stay alive.

I had always assumed that my near death experiences were the result of psychological shock caused by Margaet’s diagnosis.  In general terms, I know that self ”diagnosis” is correct, but this is really only part of the story.  My Multiple near death experiences were actually an unintended parting gift from the woman who was once Margaret and my closest friend.

In about April 2020, just as the Covid restrictions were being implemented, Anne showed us a wooden chest she had bought in an Opportunity Shop.  It was lined in tin and had been varnished.  I offered to remove the varnish and sand down the box to make it look like a million dollars.  Within five minutes of starting the sanding, I realized the varnish was not varnish but a mixture of kerosene and boot polish called “Easy Wax”.  The easy wax melted as soon as a sander started work on it.  It eventually took me about 12 weeks to finish the sanding.  During the sanding process, I developed the same horrendous cough that cropped up after the diagnosis.

Cleaning the chest was immensely hard work, but in the end, I turned it into something beautiful.  I will post a photo of the chest after I get home.  The chest was a “home made” one and it had been constructed out of a native Australian timber called King Billie Pine.

Most of my work on the chest took place after Margaret’s cancer diagnosis; it was physically hard, gruelling work and the circumstances in which I did it were grim.  My deep seated coughing increased dramatically after I started working on the chest.  Even through carpentry masks, the saw dust settled in my lungs.  During the final weeks of work, I thought the coughing, combined with the increasingly frequent “breath attacks” meant my future life span would probably be short., but I continued grimly with the work.  I had started the restoration process, so I had to finish it.  Unless I finished, the chest was fit only for the rubbish dump.

At the suggestion of the nutritionist, I had begun a daily record of my daily exercise and in this record, I recorded the restoration work on Anne’s furniture as “exercise”.  I started restoration work on Saturday 6 June and finished on Friday 2 October.  This Table summarises the work I did for Anne.

June/ July 2020		August 2020		September/ October 2020
Date	Hours	Date	Hours	Date	Hours
Saturday 6 June	2 ½ hours sanding wooden table	Saturday 1 August	2 ½ hours sanding wooden chest	Wednesday 9 September	4 hours carpentry work on wooden chest
Thursday 11 June	2 hours restoring wooden table	Tuesday 4 August	2 ½ hours sanding wooden chest	Wednesday 23 September	2 hours carpentry work on wooden chest
Friday 26 June	2 ½ hours sanding wooden table	Wednesday 5 August	3 ½ hours sanding wooden chest	Thursday 24 September	1 hour carpentry work on wooden chest
Saturday 11 July	4 hours sanding wooden table	Saturday 15 August	3 hours sanding wooden chest	Saturday 26 September	1 ½ hours carpentry work on wooden chest
Thursday 16 July	1 ½ hours sanding wooden chest	Tuesday 18 August	2 ¾ hours sanding wooden chest	Friday 2 October	1 hour carpentry work on wooden chest
Friday 17 July	1 ½ hours sanding wooden chest	Wednesday 19 August	2 ½ hours sanding wooden chest
Wednesday 22 July	2 ¼ hours sanding wooden chest	Tuesday 25 August	3 ½ hours sanding wooden chest
Thursday 23 July	2 ½ hours sanding wooden chest
Friday 24 July	2 ¼ hours sanding wooden chest
Saturday 25 July	2 ¾ hours sanding wooden chest	Thursday 27 August	3 ½ hours sanding wooden chest
Wednesday 29 July	2 ¾ hours sanding wooden chest
Friday 31 July	2 ¼ hours sanding wooden chest

 

This is a photo of the chest taken shortly after I began restoring it.

This is a photo of the chest after I had finished restoring it.

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I mentioned my coughing and other symptoms to my bother a week before I left Australia.  My brother was horrified at what I told him.  King Billie Pine and some other Australian timbers have developed immensely effective methods of killing any things that try to eat them.  Bill knew 2 carpenters who had developed similar symptoms to me who had also nearly died when they worked with native Australian timbers.  The only way they could continue to make furniture with King Billie Pine was by wearing closed circuit oxygen rebreathers. 

Bill told me that a log of King Billie Pine can lie on the ground for up to 2,000 years and not rot.  Even though I had worn dusts masks while working, I had ingested a large quantity of the insect defence material in the King Billie Pine.  This had given me the couging while I was working on Anne’s table and chest.  It had laid dormant until Margaret got her diagnosis.  The diagnosis had incited the defences which now form part of me.  The defences rose in revolt against Margaret’s imminent death.

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So that was the parting gift given to me and Margaret by her close friend just before she cancelled both of us.

Thank you, Anne for your parting gift.  You did not give Margaret her cancer, but you did give me an immune system that sees me as the enemy instead of the body it must protect.

Anne thinks neither Margaret nor I matter, and fails to realise that if we don’t matter, she cannot possibly matter either, because either everybody matters or no one at all matters.

The tears would not stop as I wandered through the streets of Killarney this morning.  Margaret and I had wandered these same streets at least twice and perhaps more often.