April Fool's Day
by Bryce Courtenay
first published 1994.
The young salesgirl from whom I purchased my copy some weeks ago tried to sell me a jumbo box of tissues to go with it...
"A Modern Love Story" is the book's subtitle, and there is no accident to the nonsubtle cynicism of this description...for this is an ANGRY book, a book that rages, not just against the genetic tragedy that bypassed Benita Courtenay's first two sons to claim Damon- but it is also an anguished, embittered railing aginst the bureaucraticc bunglings, mismanagement, highhandedness and incompetencies that led to his death at such an early age.
For Damon Courtenay, born a haemophiliac, died of Aids....transfusion- induced Aids....Aids introduced by transfusions of blood products accepted from donor groups long decreed unacceptable in other countries, using a technique acknowledged to be less safe than other proven, more costly methods. In Australia, at that time, under the Equal Opportunity provisions, EVERYONE had the right to give blood...and a Health Minister defended that right, even though the mechanics of Aids transmission were already becoming widely known.
The disruption to normal family life seems almost unbelievable. Damon's haemophilia was to cost him two days in every week of his school life, and he was to receive, during his life, at least three blood transfusions a week and sometimes more, usually late at night.
That there is no love lost between Bryce Courtenay and the Australian medical profession in general is made very clear from Chapter 1. In fact, this whole book is a shouted objection, a bitter railing against fate, circumstance and bureaucracy, so vehement that it leaves the reader, too, quite battleweary. Nor is Damon's dying sentimentally or aesthetically sanitised for us. Aids is an ugly death, and Damon's is uglier than most...a drawn-out enduring to exhaust both subject and subjected until there is no beauty left in that lingering life.
Damon had intended, Bryce assures us, to write his own story, feeling that the real facts of aids need to be made clear to a misinformed world. Lacking the time, and it would seem, the skill, Damon's last request was for his father to `please write my book' and his father did, indeed, bury himself in this task as a grief-assuaging therapy before the rawness of that suffering, and the fury, had in any way abated..
Had I been Bryce Courtenay's editor, I would have suggested, I think, that he set this writing task aside for a spell....to take time to reflect and heal before diving headlong into this vitriolic saga.....but then this would not have been, truly, Damon's story, warts and all, would it?
Damon Courtenay dies in the first line of the first, introductory chapter of this 666 page book; thus 665 pages tell the story of his life from birth to that death on April Fool's Day, 1991, when Bryce and Benita Courtenay were forced, after 25 years, to surrender their youngest son to the inevitable.
"You'll need them..." she advised, and I suppose I did, but somehow the sheer length of Damon's journey fom death to birth- and back again to death is so incredibly gruelling that the reader is left as numb and drained as were his parents and his devoted parner, Celeste.
But before the Aids, there was the haemophilia.......
...Haemophilia is as extraordinarily painful and protracted disease. A bleed is usually treated eight or ten hours after it has started, for it takes this long for a knock to become more painful thatn the initial bump. People bump themselves around sixty times a day and so it is impossible to notice a bump and transfuse it immediately. You have to wait and see if an ordinary, casual bump has caused internal bleeding. But once a bleed starts, the pain continues long after the blood transfusion has been given. The clotting component, Factor V111, takes at least seven hours to stop continuous bleeding and often as long as a couple of days. This means that internal blood, seeping out of thousands of capillaries, builds up pressure under the skin. Unable to break the skin, the blood soon has nowhere to go and pushes inwards. The result is not dissimilar to being squeezed tighter and tighter by a vice. Imagine your hand, arm or knee in a vice which is squeezed relentlessly for eight or ten hours. The pain would become unbearable..."
In the early days, it was Bryce Courtenay's job to get Damon to hospital and stay with him while the missing Factor V111was transfused to allow his blood to begin clotting, usually a three hour round trip that took over the sleep patterns of both. Later, much later, after a bittler political struggle, ended only by the direct intervention of new Prime Minister, Gough Whitlam, Haemophilics and their families earned the right to store blood products at home and self-transfuse....a right sufferers in other countriues had been granted long before.....a quality-of-life enhancer long and bitterly opposed by Australia's didactic medical profession.
So this is an angry book......anger at a young life expended, anger at things managed and mismanaged, anger at perceived shortcomings and weaknesses. And there is also the rawness of inevitable guilt, for do we not all see, when it is too late, how much better we might all have behaved...how DIFFERENTLY we could have performed?
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