Free Damned if I Do by Philip Nitschke Page B

water. I also thought I should do something to mark my stay. I stamped my name and the date, and something about digging out the well, on an aluminium plate, drove a star picket into the ground and wired the plate to it. I was imitatingLen Beadell, a surveyor, bushman and road builder in the years after World War II. He started out making access roads to the infamous Maralinga atomic test site, but continued to build a network of roads in central Australia. His most notable road is theGunbarrel Highway, which runs right through the Gibson. He wrote a number of books about his experiences, telling how he’d hammered his name and other information onto metal plates, shot holes in them with his revolver, and bolted them to 44-gallon drums filled with cement.
    About twenty years after my visit, I got an email from a bloke who’d recently been at Jupiter Well and had dug the well out, just as I had. He’d found the plaque I’d left, recognised the name Nitschke as associated with euthanasia and wondered if I’d had anything to do with it. He sent a photograph, and there it was—the marker I’d made, still intact. Many ofBeadell’s markers have been souvenired, or acquired by museums, and there’s a plan to replace them. I wonder whether my plaque has been souvenired by now; I’d like to go back and see.
    Looking back on that experience in the desert, I realise that I was looking for more than just a break from Sydney. Ever since the episodes with headaches and chest pains, and my brush with psychiatry, I’d been subject to the utter terror that goes with thinking you are dying from some terrible disease. This form ofhypochondria allows you to slide down into a cycle of worry about symptoms, which allows more symptoms to develop. For me, sometimes there have been real triggers and real fears. For example, there were many lepers at Wave Hill. I’d noticed that quite a number of the people were wearing shoes, which was unusual for theGurindji, and I wondered why. I found out that they were being treated at the East Arm Leprosarium in Darwin. Withleprosy, you lose sensation in your feet and hands and so become subject to injuries like camp fire burns—you simply don’t notice them. This leaves you vulnerable to infections, and that’s when gangrene can set in.
    In Alice, when I was rangering, I began noticing changes to sensation in my feet—peripheral neuropathy, which is a disturbance of the nerves and interference with normal sensation. My first thought was leprosy; the incubation period for its development seemed about right and I immediately began to panic.I then spent weeks seeing doctors with little satisfaction, until I finally foundTrevor Cutler at the Aboriginal health centre, who had some experience of the condition. He examined my feet and quickly dismissed my feared diagnosis. I forget what he attributed the neuropathy to, but he told me to forget it and almost immediately the trouble went away.
    Over the years, I’ve struggled with these demons and wonder occasionally, why me? What was it about my parents or upbringing that made me vulnerable? No one else I knew had this problem, and rarely was there any ­sympathy. In fact, when I elected to do medicine, it was at the back of my mind that I could educate myself out of my fears and phobias. Unfortunately, the plan failed spectacularly. At medical school, you learn about a whole lot of new diseases worse than any you’ve ever heard of, and what you think might be wrong with you expands exponentially. I think that by going alone out into the desert I was looking for some kind of quasi-spiritual experience to help me straighten out my thinking. It may have worked for a time but the hypochondria persists and it’s been one of the main causes of conflict in many of my relationships with women; living with someone who regularly thinks they’re dying can be intolerable.
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    I had to spend time