The new year of the course started with a whimper and having the student listed on the roll meant the course officials could simply drop the concessions they had agreed to. Something they promptly did.
Despite things immediately skewing out of the expected direction he wanted to end the year with a record of excellence and he had the skills to do it.
He would go to a bus stop at 5am. The bus would go either to the station at Wyong where he would catch a train to Ourimbah or to Westfield’s Mall at Tuggerah. At Wesfield's he had another hour to the next bus and would fill the time with coffee and a muffin for breakfast while he worked on essays and reports. Both directions took a lot out of him and which one depended on how well he felt or what the course consisted of this day.
From Orimbah Station to the campus was a painful walk but he would study for a couple of hours in the library and possibly have breakfast at the campus café when he arrived. He would be exhausted before class but his projects were advanced enough to cruise through. He didn’t know he had diabetes and was constantly surprised by mood swings and collapses when he didn’t eat.
He arrived home as late as 7pm most days and would eat and work on projects until midnight or even 3pm. He had no friends outside of university. Went nowhere and did nothing. There was no money and no strength for anything else. He needed assistance to survive. The hospital had refused to offer him the least support and the university also refused to live up to obligations he had depended on.
He began lobbying anyone he could think of to get help.
He approached the student union who were resentful about being asked to stand up to members of the university faculty. The union appears to be there to present the students having political ambitions with a vehicle and a little experience. They don’t like doing anything some administrator would remember when they tried to get into politics later. They were, and always will be, compromised by the conflicts of interest and their lack of cojones
He lobbied the vice chancellor, the Minister of Education and the university chaplain for disability supports he had been promised. It seemed fantastic to be refused.
Members of his degree course were demanding he stop bringing attention onto the ramshackle course and some even demanded he lower the quality of his essays as they made their hand-written efforts look lazy. His work dropped in quality from obtaining distinctions and high distinctions to being barely legible.
Some of the lecturers became openly hostile with the head of the IT attacking him verbally in the library while he was too ill to reply. Nobody thought the choice of timing was an accident. The head of IT was not known for his bravery.
He began to drift away from his friends among the students as the energy it took to socialize was becoming difficult to find and memory loss continued. His ability to visualize had been slipping for a while and should be seen as an early marker in situations where brain injuries are being caused by ongoing stress and physical excesses or even by grief. He was drowning in pain and would lash out verbally if anyone caused him to struggle with ideas.
He slipped when sliding a large frame across a work table and it broke a window. He was immediately considered to have done something out of vindictiveness despite clearly explaining at the time. His need for support was causing resentment. Somehow he was supposed to “suck up” a situation which was killing him.
He received a letter from Centerlink with an appointment to a psychiatrist in Gosford to test him for the memory loss. He went to the office by the round-about near the railway station in Gosford where he was greeted by a hostile man who asked him a lot of questions. The man eventually threw up his hands and stated unbelievably. “I can find nothing wrong with you except that you are a liar. Get out!”
The student has gone over this statement in his mind many times and wondered what device the psychiatrist had which defined a patient as liar and how he could have found nothing. He left with a dead weight in his stomach knowing it was a set-up between certain university lecturers and their alumni or even fellow lodge members but thought nothing more of it.
Later a letter arrived from someone at Centerlink called Sally Train. The letter informed him he had failed to prove his memory problems to a psychiatrist so his pension was cut off. It had been cut off sometime before they told him of it so there was little or no money in the bank.
The Chittaway Affair, page 5. Ourimbah Campus
He wasn’t on the pension for his memory so it made no sense it was cancelled over a question of memory anyway. The specialists he saw were scandalized by his situation and expedited things as much as they could. His heart was failing. He had to get the pension back. He was racing to emergency appointments with specialists to re-apply for the disability pension. All of the students labored to prepare works for the final assessment and exhibition.
He fell rapidly behind with the rent and his mother supplied him with groceries as he had nothing to fall back on.
He was starting to suffer breakdowns and the resentment being aimed at him from the university meant everything he did was measured as though he had suddenly become a mad dog. Every iota of his being was directed into surviving the course and getting to the end. He was the first in his family to get a degree. He was crippled and ruined and it was a once in a lifetime chance which would not come again if he let go.
He managed to get paintings on the wall for the final big show but in a fit of resentment and outrage the visiting judge gave him a zero for the work. He begged for marks to get a pass, He had all high achievements for most of the course and his work was as capable as anyone else’s.
The lecturer judge was abusive telling how he was an ungrateful student who had caused the lecturers great hardship. It was difficult to absorb when he was so close to collapse and using his last emotional and psychic energy to get through.
Over the years he wanted to go back to each of these people and ask what they thought had happened. His begging got a few extra got the extra points to get his degree but it was primarily the fact of his exceptional marks up to this point which swung it.
He shouldn’t have had to demean himself but all the hard work to achieve excellence was otherwise ignored and wasted when the marks were given. He was left without any way to continue his push into higher academia and was again forced to leave comments floating which needed a response and would follow him through life. The people he would have needed to sponsor him into a masters or honors degree were the people who had betrayed and undermined him.
He was too ill to do anything. The world was a haze of painful exhaustion.
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