A Million Miles from Help

Photo: Simon Upton

Australians living in rural and remote areas have shorter lives. They also have higher levels of disease and injury and reduced access to health services than their city counterparts. Warramba owner Neil Varcoe recounts his experience of growing up with a chronically-ill father, in this piece written for Galah.

Dad’s lungs were in the hall; his heart was in the bedroom.
Each night the oxygen machine would whirl and wheeze, like some crude monster. At first it scared me, then I came to be comforted by the sound. It was the sound of dad breathing: I knew he was alive. I could sleep.
When a brown Toyota Tarago turned up at soccer practice, I knew something was wrong.
He always came to pick me up, he never missed. Where is he? Where’s Dad?
I quickly jumped into the passenger seat next to our neighbour, Mr Statham. He was silent. I sobbed. It was time.
The small beeper that Dad wore on his hip had four words on the screen: ‘It’s here. Come now.’
There had been so many false alarms—the last during a steak dinner on holidays at Port Macquarie—but this was finally it. Dad would get a new lung. He would finally be able to play soccer with me in the yard.
Dad was always sick, for as long as I could remember. He was 40 when I was born and already he would breathe at the top of his chest like a stunned bird. As a young man, he was a tearaway. Thick hair, crooked smile, all leather jackets and self-assurance. He worked on cars and motorbikes on the weekend, and played squash and field hockey. I bet the girls loved him. He had the world at his feet and the house to himself. His parents had died early, too.
I never met my grandparents; none of us kids did. We should have, but Lithgow was a million miles from help.
The walls looked like custard pie and smelt like a wet rag. I put my bag down in a room that looked like a wardrobe, and walk–ran down the hall with my Mum, eager to see Dad. He was ‘out of the woods, now’, whatever that meant. I brought him chocolates, liquorice: his favourites. This place was supposed to be a home away from home. It was convenient. Convenient is a good word for it.
Dad was a new colour. He looked sore but he was renewed. Mum looked worried, but she always looked worried. I felt good. Dad would be home in a few weeks, a new man.
Dad was a tough guy, a coal miner, the man they called ‘The Rock’. But there was a softness to him, a generosity of spirit; he was a man ahead of his time, in many ways. He loved animals—I remember his tears when the stray cat we adopted died from a snake bite. He would often call me into his bedroom at 7 pm to watch the tiny television he had so he could do his exercises in peace: seated chest flys with a two-kilogram bag of rice.
‘Quick, son, a whale is breaching on the news,’ he would bellow.
He had three sons, but everyone knew that he meant me. We’d watch the story and then I’d sit there. He’d tell me I could go if I wanted to, but I never wanted to. There were six of us in the house his father built, and I enjoyed my time alone with him.
Six years later I hugged dad’s body. It was cold. His last breath had escaped his lungs 40 minutes earlier, as we fought the traffic on Parramatta Road. I was sixteen. My father was gone. Lithgow was a million miles from help.
Now I lie in bed flooded with fear, listening for the sounds of my daughter’s breath. I know it’s irrational but I can’t let it go—what if I’m right? What if she’s not breathing? I walk down the hall of our city base, minutes from help.
The light from the hall falls across Molly’s face. She’s a few weeks old. Her chest rises and falls. She’s okay.
Tomorrow, we’ll lower her into her car seat for the three-hour drive to Warramba, our home in the Capertee Valley near Lithgow, a million miles from help.

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