A Pain in the Poo Factory 09 Gradually I became unplugged. The catheter went first, a short but unnerving experience which felt like one’s insides were being yanked out via a small tube through a very tiny opening. Next to go was my deals on wheels. I said goodbye to the pyramids and decided they […]

A Pain in the Poo Factory 07 I must have been about four or five years old when my mother took me into a building in Canterbury road, in Canterbury, in the inner-eastern suburbs of Melbourne. It was probably a church hall. It was loud and noisy; steel filing drawers slammed and footsteps and heels […]

A Pain in the Poo Factory 07 Emma changed my dressings. Considering that in theory I was opened right up, it was unbelievable that there were just four bandages. The largest one was in the middle of my belly near my navel, and the centre of a blaze of colour, like a fiery desert sunset. […]

A Pain in the Poo Factory 06 A smiling Malaysian doctor looked down at me as she adjusted my oxygen mask. “Do you know where you are,” she asked. I was bathed in gentle morning sunshine on a lovely little palm-fringed beach on Xanadu. Olivia Newton-John cradled me in her arms, her eyes brimming with […]

A Pain in the Poo Factory 05 Cathy told me later they wanted to speak to me while I was in recovery. I had appeared lucid, and they’d handed me my cochlear implant, hoping I would put it on. Apparently I’d gazed at it a few moments and flaked out again. That’s when they called […]