My life has always been full of drama. I seem to be attracted to it somehow. It was the summer of 2003 and I was in Perth to catch a bus to Carnarvon to visit my three beautiful boys who all lived with their Mum and were still at school. Since Tania their mother had moved from Perth to Carnarvon my life was just a series of access visits at school holiday time with a lot of loneliness, depression and anxiety in between.
My girlfriend Sheryl and I had decided to have tea in the Northbridge restaurant strip in East Perth before I caught the bus to the outback over a thousand kilometres away. I hated going on these trips because I hated leaving my kids in Carnarvon. My youngest son Ashley, named after my brother, would wave at me in the bus while it was leaving and he would cry, this made me cry, it was heart-wrenching. I wrote a song about it and recorded it but that’s another story.
As we walked around the busy city streets looking for a restaurant I had this sixth sense urging me to follow my nose. I wasn’t too sure what I was looking for but when I saw it I would know. I told myself that it was a divine mission and in fact that is what my night ended up being. We strolled along the busy street at around 6.00 pm, and I took pleasure observing and studying all the animated people rushing around the streets, all dressed to party, which means I was perving at the girls. Suddenly approaching an intersection, we saw a Hare Krishna sweeping the footpath outside a restaurant, the Hare Krishna restaurant. Bingo, I had heard good things about this place. Sheryl and I had wanted to eat there for a while. The food was very cheap, $2 a serve I think, it was Indian and tasty and the Hare’ Krishna’s had a reputation for love, kindness and friendliness.
I wanted to feel the love so I tugged my girlfriend along by the hand and we entered the Hare’ food hall and sat down and ate a lovely tasty curry with rice and papadams. We met a lot of wonderful people in that restaurant, the atmosphere was great and in the end we discussed philosophy with the bloke who was sweeping the street. I was interested to see what motivated these spiritual beings to devote their lives to chanting their religious mantra. In the end we decided it all came down to the love of our fellow man, which is ironic because what happened next blew me away.
We shook hands with the spiritual street sweeper and walked out the door. We hadn’t walked more than a few metres along the footpath lined with shops when I noticed something out of place. Something that caused the hairs on the back of my neck to stand up and tingle like an alert canine. As I said previously I have a sixth sense that has been honed over the years by fighting on the street when I was a bouncer and serving time in jail in my younger years. Not much gets past me and this occasion was to be no exception.
Next door to the restaurant was a shop that had an alcove with a recessed door, on the doorstep a man was curled up in the foetal position, because of how he was dressed and the way he looked I knew he was injured. The prone man was about 45 years old, he had on clean pressed jeans, dress shoes and a collared shirt. Hundreds of people had walked past this person but nobody had done anything to help him. Most people would have just categorised him as a wino or homeless person, it’s an old cliche’ and unfortunately in this case a bad one.
My reaction was immediate, I threw my mobile phone underarm at my girlfriend, she was already half way up the street and telling me to ”leave the guy alone, he is a drunk”. She caught the phone and I yelled with some urgency “Ring an ambulance, now”! While she dialled the number I kneeled down to check the guy out, he had a weak pulse and shallow breathing and was non responsive, I couldn’t smell any alcohol and I couldn’t see any obvious signs of injury, that is until I rolled his head over carefully to see the left side of his face belted in, somebody had bashed him and left him for dead. As I did this he opened his eyes and looked at me in a sad and imploring fashion, he groaned out the words “I’ve been bashed” and promptly passed out. As I was doing this a young couple stopped to ask if I needed help, Sheryl was talking to the ambulance operator and giving them a location, as I leaned over my patient, he let out all his breath in a sigh and didn’t start breathing again. I yelled at the young couple, “he’s stopped breathing, help me pull him onto the footpath”. We grabbed him by the legs, all three of us and manoeuvered him onto the street. When his head got to the step, which was about fifteen centimetres high, his head fell onto the footpath with a crack. Not much I could do about it, I made a mistake, I had probably knocked the poor bloke out trying to save him, but all I could do was forge on.
Once we had him prone on his back I checked all his vitals and his airway, he still was not breathing and about a minute had passed, he had a heart beat though so I went in for the kill, an an apt term under the circumstances, mouth to mouth it was, or they call it expired air resuscitation since I last did my senior first aid course, and believe me sucking on one of those dummies is nothing like the real thing. By now, a large crowd had started to develop and encircle me as I worked away. He would not breathe on his own so I hacked away for twenty minutes, his heart kept going though. The young couple encouraged me and assured me that if his heart stopped they would help me with CPR (Cardio Pulmonary Resuscitation).
Suddenly he coughed and came to, then vomited everywhere, he then came out with one of those classic lines that you get the rare laugh out of once in a while in unusual situations like this, he groans out to me, “Can I have a smoke”?. I let out a chuckle and blurt out “Mate you’re fucking dying here and you want a smoke”. Everybody wants a last smoke if they get the firing squad, the noose or the chair but this bloke was a fucking comedian. I felt like I was in a bad Woody Allen movie. My patient promptly passed out again and stopped breathing. I’m screaming at Sheryl by now, “Where’s the fucking ambulance”? People in the crowd are encouraging me to keep going and I am too busy really to pay much attention but I remembered when pondering it later as you do.
Somebody from the crowd handed me a large bottle of coke from the Hare’ restaurant which I had screamed out for somebody to get while I was giving EAR and spitting vomit out of my mouth. I needed it to wash my mouth out of vomit and to clean myself and my dying patient. The ambulance people relayed to us on Sheryl’s phone that they were still 10 minutes away so I kept this bloke breathing until we heard the blaring siren finally they arrived a full 35 minutes after we called them, this is in Perth? They rushed over to me and the victim with oxygen and a respirator and as one Medic took over I quickly got up and told his partner the background of what had happened and said goodbye. The grateful medic simply shook my hand and said “Mate, you saved his life”.
I pushed my way through the crowd, Sheryl in tow and headed off West towards the Perth bus station, as we walked away the crowd erupted in applause, how embarrassing, a few people rushed up to me and shook my hand. “Fucking wow”, one of them exclaimed, “that was amazing, you saved that guys life”! I was feeling a bit flustered at all this and as we walked away, after about a hundred metres when nobody was around I turned to Sheryl and sobbed, “Did that just fucking happen”? I cried my eyes out for a minute like a big sook. We got to the bus station and I got on the bus heading North to Carnarvon and waved goodbye to Sheryl, I was still in shock. I was elated though that I had saved the guy. The most ironic thing is that we were talking with the hare Krishna’s earlier in the night about the value of life and helping our fellow man. I rang the hospital the next day to inquire about the stranger involved. I found out that as well as being bashed he was an epileptic but he survived his ordeal. I never did get to meet him, the hospital is not allowed to give out those details. Boy did I have a good story to tell my kids.
