Deborah Bogle - The Advertiser - June 23, 2012 12:00AM
Aidan Coleman. Picture Matt Turner Source: The Advertiser
WHEN poet Aidan Coleman had a stroke he was lost for words, but now he has written about his experience in verse.
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I died last night, while panic
happened round me;
came awake to a different room.
My arm, my legs, perhaps
my mind:
I gave them up without a struggle.
It was more gentle than any theft.
Too gentle to believe.
IN eight short lines Aidan Coleman distils the drama of the night that changed his life. Delivered with such a lightness of touch and read in a moment, the poem's simple clarity rings with a truth far more convincing than any medical chart.
Coleman was an award-winning teacher of English and history and a noted poet when, at 31, he went to the Royal Adelaide Hospital's emergency department with a severe headache. He had been suffering for two years from a recurrent cough, frequently accompanied by vomiting, but doctors had been unable to determine the cause. At the RAH, he was given a dose of painkillers and when the headache had eased staff prepared to discharge him. As it turned out, the delays that are inevitable in a busy casualty department gave Coleman a critical advantage in the crisis that followed.
"They signed the paperwork to send me home," he says. "Fortunately they took a long time doing that and in the meantime I had the stroke, there and then."
Scans revealed the cause: a tumour on his brain stem. The medical term is astrocytoma. The chilling import of the diagnosis is conveyed in Coleman's verse account of his stroke and its aftermath: astrocytoma is not just the cause but the stark title of one of the poems. In the hours following his stroke, Coleman's wife, Leana, was told to prepare for the worst. "At first, they told my wife it was 50:50 whether I was going to live or not," he says. When, after five or six hours, he regained consciousness, both legs and his right arm were paralysed.
"I woke up surrounded by all the most important people in my life and I knew that something really bad had happened," he says. Someone asked him a question. He describes the moment in The Question:
I speak an empty
comic bubble.
I try again
and now again.
Nothing but air
and the hum of the room.
The click
and dull bounce of machines.
Five years later, Coleman is restored to health - although there is some lasting damage. He returned to his teaching job at Cedar College 18 months after the stroke, but has recently taken on a new role as a communications writer in the Department of Treasury and Finance. Earlier this year he celebrated the birth of his son Louis, a sister to two-year-old Beatrice, and the publication of a new collection of poems, Asymmetry. It is a remarkably eloquent account of the key moments of his illness and recovery that takes you into the heart and mind of a stroke survivor.
It was five days before he could move his legs. Regaining the use of his right arm and hand took much longer. The fingers on his right hand now move as one. "I can play tennis but I can't surf because that's a complicated muscle movement," he says. Scraps of speech returned to him at the end of the first week, but he struggled to find words and form sentences. "I asked for a dictionary so that I could point to things, but all the letters were scrambled," he says. "The words appeared out of order in my mind and some words ... I struggled to think what was the first letter ... so a dictionary wasn't any help."
Once he had regained his strength - the two years of illness leading up to the stroke had left him seriously underweight for his 190cm frame - surgeons removed what they could of the benign tumour. "I've got to go back for regular scans ... but it doesn't look to be growing back," he says.
His great fear, as he sought to recover his poetic voice, was that he had lost the ability to make metaphors. "A poem relies on metaphor," he says. "If you don't get that real high, if you don't get that inspiration, you'll never write a poem. You'll just be working away at stuff that doesn't become a poem. So it was about eight months before my first metaphor came."
He was also immensely relieved to discover that, unlike many stroke survivors, his memories were intact. "Memory is everything for a poet ... because all the poems you've read contribute, in a funny way, to what you give back to that conversation, and if I had lost that, I would have lost the ability to write poetry, and I would have lost the ability to teach. And probably my identity," he says.
At first, he wrote love poems to his wife. "That was a good cure," he says. "Billy Wilder said, 'when you're down you should write a comedy and when you're feeling upbeat you should write a tragedy'. I wrote the love poems when I was in a really dark place psychologically, but when I was feeling more upbeat, after writing those poems, I was actually ready, about a year after the stroke, to visit the actual event of the stroke."
Adelaide poet and writer Peter Goldsworthy - who along with Les Murray has provided cover endorsements for Asymmetry - believes that Coleman's poetry has risen to a new level in this latest collection. "Not in terms of technique. He's always had that. He's always been a fantastic imagist," he says. "It's the most astonishing subject - to use words to write about the recovery of words. I wouldn't wish it on anyone, what he's been through, but it's an extraordinary experience to be able to write from within."
Coleman himself believes he is a better poet since the stroke. "Yeats says 'perfect the life or perfect the art'," he says. While it has robbed him of some of his spontaneity - he finds "the quick one-two" of small talk still eludes him - and he tends to a more melancholic world view, the stroke has left him a keener, more thoughtful observer of life. "It's easy to say, me being on the good side of this suffering, but I wouldn't undo it from that point of view," he says. "It changes you and makes you notice other things. There are days when I wish I hadn't had the stroke, when I feel a bit awkward or that sort of thing. But I think it has made my experience deeper, made me more thankful. And that ... I wouldn't give back."
Asymmetry is published by Brandl & Schlesinger, $24.95
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