November 2001 Volume 82 Number 10
"serving the protectors"
| November 2001 Volume 82 Number 10 "serving the protectors" |
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Battles Outside the Job |
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| By Brett Williams |
The news that a cancerous tumour would likely mean the loss of his right kidney left Jamie Lewcock completely numb. He knew scans had, the day before, revealed a growth but was not then greatly concerned. Now, staggered to hear his doctor speak of people living with only one kidney, his calmness turned to shock. Lewcock wanted to turn back time. He, and his wife, Tracey, simply “weren’t ready for it (the diagnosis)” on that mid-July evening this year.
A biopsy a week later confirmed the tumour was malignant. One of Lewcock’s first thoughts was perhaps irrational for a civilian, but natural for a cop. He felt that, as a burly, seasoned police officer, he should, like a superman, be impervious to disease.
“That really crosses your mind,” he says. “You think: ‘This shouldn’t be happening to me. I’m a cop. I should be out there, not being crook at home’.
“I’ve been through all the high-speeds, threatening situations and survived it all, and here is a bloody cancer that knocks me for a six. That’s frustrating.”
But Lewcock tried to respond in traditional cop fashion - with humour. He joked about inviting friends to the hospital for steak and kidney pie after his organ’s then imminent removal. No doubt crass to some, this was his way of dealing with the trauma. It made life, he says, “a bit more tolerable”.
Some who knew of Lewcock’s past traumas, however, must have wondered whether this would be the one to push him over the edge.
He had lost his partner to a stabbing murder at Salisbury in 1990; and his son, Thomas, had been born with partial deafness and a facial malformation in 1996. As well, his wife had, through the mid-’90s, suffered serious bouts of post-natal depression, with which they both had to deal.
They felt all they had confronted - and survived - served as a “a wake-up call” that reinforced the value of human life. Naturally, they did not feel the need for another such call.
“Life is always throwing up challenges for you somewhere along the line,” says Lewcock, in a philosophic tone. “We’ve never given in with the problems we’ve encountered. For us, it has always been: ‘Let’s be strong about it’.”
And Lewcock would need all the physical and emotional strength he could muster. Only a week after the biopsy, he lay in a hospital bed ready to have his kidney removed. Before then, he had passed blood in his urine, suffered great abdominal pain and felt intensely lethargic.
So, with no experience of major surgery, Lewcock underwent the operation. When it was over, he would describe it as “the worst thing I’ve ever been through in my life”.
“I had it in the afternoon,” he explains. “That night, I had to ask the doctor for some more painkillers, because it was just excruciating. It was like nothing I’d ever felt before and was such a big shock to the system - physically and mentally.
“The morphine was on a press-button - as you needed it - and that was for about three days afterwards.”
But another trauma was yet to strike Lewcock - even before his discharge from hospital. As he lay racked with pain on only his second day in recovery, he learned his father had just died of bowel cancer.
Although expected, his father’s death “surely didn’t help” Lewcock. The loss, in an already painful time, plagued him with saddening thoughts of an impending funeral.
Then, on day three after the operation, came the lowest point of his entire struggle. “That was just a shit day,” he exclaims. “I was just absolutely knackered - physically exhausted and emotionally drained.
“The nurses virtually closed the doors and said: ‘Look, sleep it through’.”
He remained in hospital for a week, but the company of visiting family and police friends lifted his spirits. After his discharge, he began a three-month convalescence at home.
Today, Lewcock reflects on his health trauma as the worst time of his life. To confront, he found it even more difficult than the murder of his partner. He felt great anger toward the cancer, and wondered why, at the age of only 37, he became its victim.
Even the sight of seemingly healthy old people induced anger in him. Says Lewcock: “I’d be thinking: ‘You’re 70 or 80 years old and you’re sitting there having a smoke. Why haven’t you, rather than me, got this (disease)?’ ”
And fear as well played a part in his range of emotions. He feared he might not survive the ordeal, and that, if he did, he might end up pensioned out of his job. Lewcock tried not to dwell on losing the fight but wanted to be sure that, if he died, his family would be secure.
But Lewcock survived, has returned to work at Fort Largs and now feels “pretty good”. Despite occasional bouts of post-operative pain, and no guarantees the cancer will not return, his future seems bright. He believes his experience of life - gained through 20-plus years as cop - helped him through what became his darkest hour.
In his best interests, he keeps thoughts of the cancer’s possible return well in the back of his mind. “If you let it fill you with dread,” he says, “you would never get on with your life. If it comes back, we’ll get across that as we come to it.
“It makes you think: ‘Let’s make sure our time - if it is short - counts’. We’ve got to make sure every moment counts with our family.”
When Liz Gordon-Jones’ first kidney transplant failed in 1990, she vowed she would never have another. The failure - caused when her new kidney clotted - left her depressed and suffering pain like she had “never experienced”.
That brutal pain was a natural disincentive to try again. But she began to question whether, in any case, her body was “good enough to receive a transplant”. Failure seemed, to Gordon-Jones, the likely outcome of a second attempt.
Four days after the transplant, she underwent surgery to have the failed organ removed. She later left hospital with no change of heart toward her earlier vow.
Two days after her discharge, however, she asked for the return of her name to the transplant waiting list.
All this was, for Gordon-Jones, the lowest point in a journey that had begun 10 years earlier - and was still not over.
The first news of the state of her health came as “a total shock” to her in 1980. Tests showed she had chronic renal failure. A specialist warned her this could lead to the complete breakdown of her kidneys and time on a dialysis machine.
“When I found out,” says Gordon-Jones, “I thought: ‘I can’t look after myself - I’ve got to get a husband’. And I literally did. I married my police partner in October (’80). I only met him in the (previous) May, a month before the diagnosis.
“It was a disastrous decision but, as a 23-year-old, I thought: ‘Someone’s got to look after me’. And the thought of having no children to look after me frightened me.”
Gordon-Jones’ marriage broke down but, for the next nine years, she lived a healthy, active life. She remained able to fulfill her police role, became a detective and worked in specialist squads and local CIBs.
Up to mid-1989, her health luckily stayed problem-free. But suddenly, in July that year, her world began to fall apart. Her mother - who had for some years suffered with Alzheimer’s disease - died.
Then, after a blood test the following month, her specialist rang her with the news that her kidneys had “acutely failed”.
So, as an accomplished detective eyeing promotion, she would have to retreat from shiftwork. This was the only way she could accommodate three-and-a-half-hour dialysis sessions three times a week.
The news shattered Gordon-Jones. She was sure her inability to work shifts would effectively end her career. She no longer believed she could realize her long-held ambition to rise to commissioned ranks.
Says Gordon-Jones: “I actually thought: ‘I can’t advance if I can’t work shiftwork and be a real copper’. I was certainly, at the start, more worried about my career than dying.
“I thought: ‘What now? Who’d want to employ me? They (SAPOL) will invalid me out’. I was terrified.”
And, with her siblings living interstate and parents dead, Gordon-Jones had only friends to support her.
Nonetheless, she moved to a day-shift job and soon began her dialysis treatment. She knew of other sufferers who had given up work to live on sickness benefits. But Gordon-Jones was “absolutely determined not to do that”.
She braved her dialysis sessions for 12 months before her first transplant, and never asked: “Why me?” “You could ask that about anything in life,” she says. “It’s not part of my thinking. That’s just the way I’ve been brought up.”
But Gordon-Jones was not free of fear. She was convinced her life was destined to be “significantly shortened”. She simply tried to push such thoughts out of her mind but remembered the chilling remark a doctor had made in 1980. He warned her that chronic renal failure could kill her.
“No one had ever said that to me before,” she says. “It stuck in my mind. I still remember it today. The fear of death now doesn’t bother me so much, but it did then.”
Despite her fears, Gordon-Jones stayed outwardly positive and kept her sense of humour. With great faith in the medicinal power of laughter, she mixed with as many happy, laughing people as she could. She believed that, had she moped and appeared continually down, others would have turned away.
But in April ’91, her fortunes were about to change. Her chance to undergo another transplant - which she had sought after the earlier failure - had finally come. She returned to hospital where surgeons implanted a second kidney in her abdomen.
“And it (the kidney) worked from the moment they stitched me up,” says Gordon-Jones. “It was operating. It didn’t really care where it was - it just wanted to work.”
Gordon-Jones’ doctor - impressed with how well the kidney matched - suggested it should last for up to 30 years.
Soon out of hospital and in recovery at home, however, Gordon-Jones faced some new dilemmas. She was terrified of “something going wrong” and never wanted to be at home alone. She came to feel her new organ was simply “floating around” inside her.
“I felt very vulnerable,” she says. “I was terrified of going into Rundle Mall and into a department store. I thought someone was going to bash my kidney and constantly had handbags in front of me.”
But Gordon-Jones emerged from her fears, continued in her job and was, by 1995, running in the Transplant Games in Manchester. Now, she jogs every day and next plans to compete in Paris as a middle-distance runner in 2003. Running, she insists, allows her to think and keeps her sane.
Meanwhile, she relies on immunosuppressant drugs and understands that one day her kidney will fail.
“I just want to keep fit and stay happy,” she says. “If my kidney fails, I’ll deal with that when it arises.”
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