There was no welcome home. NoHi, Tom, good to see you.NoThanks, mate, I could do with a hand.NoSorry about all that stuff I said and did and chucked in the dam.
Mrs LaBrooy had cried and hugged him and told him to never leave again, but Bruno? He’d just addedunemployableto the long list of adjectives he’d apparently been storing up over the years to throw at his son.
‘Left arm.’
Tom snapped back into the late January morning and focused on the instructions coming from the doctor he visited at Cooma Hospital and Health Service once a week. He lifted his arm above his head, pushing it through the range-of-motion exercises his therapist in Wollongong had drilled into him before he’d been released from the rehab ward.
‘Pain? Numbness? Tingling?’
‘Nope.’
‘Okay, right arm?’
His arms weren’t the problem. Nor was his right leg. The left was where the weakness was growing, but he was ignoring that.
‘How soon till I get my old life back, doc?’ He always asked the same question, and she always found new and inventive ways to not answer.
Today, Dr Novak made some sighing sound that puffed out the blue mask over her face like a weather balloon. ‘That’s a pretty broad question, Tom. Did you read any of those pamphlets I gave you?’
‘Cover to cover.’
‘Really,’ she said, stepping back and inspecting him with narrowed eyes. ‘What are the five stages of coping after a traumatic injury?’
‘Um …’ He’d have done more than chuck them in the glove box of his car if he’d known she was going to quiz him. ‘Denial was one of them. Anger was another.’ Been there, done that, didn’t need to read it in some pamphlet.
She ticked them off on her fingers. ‘Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. Everyone’s journey through those stages is different.’
Yeah, but not everyone had towaitthe way he did. With a ticking bomb in their spine that may or may not end up with him even more immobilised than his seventy-five-year-old grump of a father.
The truth he hadn’t shared with anyone was that he was back here in Hanrahan because his life had stalled. He wished he could get to the acceptance stage and start dealing with it, but he couldn’t.
Maybe whoever wrote that pamphlet needed to addapathyto the list.
All he’d managed to work out since he’d been home was that without his arms and legs and every bit in between in top working order, he couldn’t see a future. Getting involved with the family stockhorse business? He didn’t have the skills to take on training even if hecouldride, and the day Bruno welcomed his interference with his beloved horses would be the day the Snowy River broke its dam and became a major waterway again.
Un-bloody-likely.
Calling plumbers and arranging pest controllers to visit the buildings his dad owned in Hanrahan barely took an hour each day, the pub was apparently in the hands of the town solicitor, and Mrs L got all huffy and in-his-face if Tom did more than peel a carrot in the homestead kitchen.
So what else was there?
‘Come on, let me see that right arm come up, Tom. Stop indulging in your pity party and concentrate.’
‘Sorry.’
‘You’re injured. You’re allowed to take time to process things.Lotsof time.’ She tapped his left thigh with an implement that looked like a drumstick. ‘Now push into a slow lunge, left leg forward, let me know when it’s a struggle.’
He did as she asked, cursing when the tremor started.
Dr Novak made a note on her chart. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘You’re right, we’re seeing increased left lower extremity quadriceps weakness. Strength three over five. Any tingling?’
‘Some. It was four over five last time.’
She nodded. ‘We’ll book you in for a scan so we can see if the shrapnel’s moved in the paraspinal muscles. I hope you’re following orders: no work, no activity on your banned list.’
He must have made a grumbling noise, because she raised her eyebrows at him.
‘You’ve not been horse riding, have you? Just because you’re the son of a local horse-training legend doesn’t mean you should put your future in jeopardy.’
