Post #2000
It’s time for celebration. Earlier this year my blog celebrated its tenth birthday. With this post, I’m passing another milestone – this is post #2000. So tonight I’m gonna party like it’s 1999.
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From a 5% Survival Rate to the Open Road: Bianca Bassett’s Journey
I spoke tonight with the incredibly inspiring Bianca Bassett for The Limb Shift podcast. We ended up chatting well beyond our scheduled time because her story is just so captivating. Here is a little glimpse into her journey—I hope it gives you a taste of the powerful conversation coming your way when the podcast launches this October.
The beachy vibe of Lakes Entrance in Victoria Australia, had pretty much always been home to Bianca Bassett. At thirty-six, she was living out a familiar dream, running a local cafe filled with the rich aroma of good coffee and a relaxed, coastal energy. She was a mother in a busy blended family, raising five children alongside her husband. Life was full, fast, and predictable—until a routine day at work changed everything.
“I just felt really flat, like, oh, sort of like before you get the flu, you know, you feel achy and a little bit unwell,” Bianca recalled. It was her twelve-year-old son who noticed her appearance, prompting her to see a GP. Even as she was directed to the local hospital, her maternal instincts took over: “I said, okay, I’ll go to hospital, but I need to go home and cook my family dinner first, which I did… it’s a mum thing, right? We just keep we keep going through. We keep working through”.
By that night, she was admitted. Her condition rapidly deteriorated, leading to an emergency airlift to Melbourne and an induced coma that lasted three and a half weeks. She had contracted Zygomycosis, a rare fungal lung infection with a less than five percent survival rate, caused by a mould occasionally found in environments like hospital bathrooms.
To save her life, doctors had to secure special permission from Canberra for an expensive infusion. While she fought the infection, a deep vein thrombosis formed in her leg. Complicated by a rare, lifelong blood condition called pyruvate kinase deficiency, her doctors faced an absolute ultimatum: leg or life.
When Bianca finally woke up, her reality had completely shifted. “The feeling that I had from a leg perspective, when I woke up, it felt like I was hanging dead, hanging under the bed,” she said. It took a few days to process that her leg was gone, but she refused to let grief anchor her: “I was never really sad about it”.
Instead, she relied heavily on her loved ones and her regional community. “I’m really fortunate to live in regional Victoria where if someone’s having a tough time, the whole town gets behind you,” she noted, fondly remembering how neighbours drove her family to Melbourne or cooked meals for them.
Rehabilitation in regional Victoria lasted three months, a period where she had to rebuild entirely lost muscle mass to learn to walk with a prosthetic. In that protective bubble, she bonded deeply with other patients, but returning home was terrifying. “I was really scared to come home because you do have a sense of safety in rehab,” she admitted, recalling her anxiety about driving, navigating a small kitchen, and being a mother again.
The transition back into society brought unexpected hurdles, including blatant discrimination when she applied for an administrative role. Upon asking for a reasonable adjustment for her wheelchair, she was bluntly rejected. “They turned around and said, ‘oh, we’re really sorry, your wheelchair will get in the way. We’re not going to give you an interview,'” Bianca recounted. Though shocked, she pushed forward, eventually working for five years with Get Skilled Access, an advocacy consultancy.
Now forty-six, Bianca faces new complexities, navigating perimenopause as an amputee, which causes her stump to unpredictably change sizes. Yet her outlook remains firmly grounded.
She and her husband have bought a caravan, ready to explore the country despite the lack of accessible designs.
Reflecting on her decade-long journey, her greatest piece of wisdom is to appreciate existence at its most basic level. “Don’t sweat the small stuff,” she urged. “When you come out of a coma, it’s almost like you’re a child and you’re learning all of these new things again… I wish it wouldn’t take trauma or stories like this… to give them that wake up call. I wish we didn’t have to go through that. I wish we just held on to it from childhood, but we don’t. But we should”.
The audio of the interview with Bianca will appear in The Limb Shift podcast, launching on YouTube, Spotify and Apple podcasts during Amputee Awareness Week in Australia, October 2026.
Concerned Citizen of Newtown
Earlier today I wrote a letter to my local member of the NSW Parliament, the Member for Sydney, Alex Greenwich, telling him…
Hi Alex
I just want to put on the record my concerns about the boundaries for the new seat of Newtown, which I discovered this week I’ll be voting in at the forthcoming election.I was overseas for a number of months in 2013 during the consultation period, and so missed an opportunity to raise my concerns. Until I received the letter from the SEC I wasn’t even aware the changes had been proposed and gazetted.
The rationale for the boundaries for the new seat are confusing. I’m now part of a seat which contains suburbs I have absolutely no connection with such as Petersham and I’m now disconnected with suburbs like Moore Park, and Darlinghurst which are within walking distance, and which I think represent a more natural community of interest. Those who drew the boundaries seem to have used rather blunt tools to accommodate the need for a new seat to reflect the growing inner city population.
Anyway, it’s done, and I’m sad, because I’ll be losing you as a local member, and even though I’m sure we’ll end up with a fabulous new member (Greens, ALP likely), I suspect they’ll have a tough job trying to represent the views of quite different suburbs with few natural connections to each other.
A few hours later, I received this reply
Dear James
Alex has asked me to respond to your message about the boundary changes. Thanks for your comment about losing him as your MP – sadly there are lot of people in Alex’s network who soon won’t be his constituents.
Alex opposed the division of Surry Hills into two electorates and made submissions to the Boundaries Commission about their proposal.
Unfortunately inner city population growth continues to mean that the central city electorates will have to keep being made smaller.
We hope that there is a strong and progressive MP for the Newtown electorate after 28 March. Please make sure that your voice is heard in the process and you keep whoever it is accountable over the next four years.
Regards
Roy Bishop JP
Electorate Officer for Alex Greenwich MP
I should declare I quite like Alex. Followed on from Clover Moore. Independent. Openly gay. He sent me a hand-written Christmas card this year. Yaddah yaddah.
Irrespective of that, I’m somewhat dumbfounded I’ve ended up in this new electorate which Antony Green descibes as “very higgledy-piggledy” and which is notionally Green.
Yours,
Concerned Citizen of Newtown
Early Riser
Even though I have been told on a few occasions, I should keep the blind closed at night, due to the early morning sunrise, I have not bothered much with the advice. I quite like waking up early, and I quite like waking up naturally, you might say, with the sunshine. Besides, when you wake early, you get to see some really terrific things, without the tourist crowd. When I woke early, I wandered into the centre of Stockholm, enjoyed the peace of walking through Gamla Stan, and even saw a group of people riding on horseback.
At the other end of the day, I caught up with Robert and Sandra at Loopen, a bar which overlooks the water, and which I like very much. With its faux palm trees, and relaxed style, it i a great place to relax and chat, and even have a dance. Bliss.
There Was Something In The Air Tonight
Going to and from Swedish class tonight, there was an uneasy feeling in the air.
As I was waiting to catch the bus down to Goulburn Street, some bloke on a bicycle yelled out obscenities. “What the FGU@ are you looking at?”, he screamed.
And then on the bus, a lot of people were acting very odd indeed. There was one bloke, for example, who kept looking around the bus and giggling to himself.
Swedish class was a little more sensible, though, it was different this week. Our teacher, Marianne is having a foot operation, and so we had a replacement. “Hon heter Matilde”, Marianne told us last week.
“What do you think she looks like?”, I asked Grant over a beer at the pub before class. We were both convinced with a name like Matilde, she was at least sixty years old and probably had grey or blonde hair.
As it turns out, she’s probably about 25 years old, blonde, tanned, and gorgeous. I suspect some of the younger straight males in the class were pleasantly surprised.
Both Grant and I were of the view we might have preferred a Matthias or a Martin or even a Sven, but she turned out to be a good teacher, and we had a great night.
As I came home after class, I noticed further oddness on the streets. Lots of drunken-ness. Snogging on the streets of Surry Hills. Generally oddness. Well, even more odd than you usually find in The Slurry.
In some respects there’s a bit of the “Deep South” about Sydney on these warm, sticky nights. Everyone seems to go a little bit crazy, and often you see some deeply disturbing drunken behaviour on the streets of Surry Hills on such a night.
This was something I guess I first noticed when I was living in Bourke. We had a lot of street drinking during summer which, not surprisingly, disappeared during winter. The arrival of commercial television also made a difference :)
Likewise at work, I can generally pick “the silly season” at work, as behaviour becomes a little bit odd, you might say.
I haven’t checked to see if it’s a full-moon tonight, but even if it’s not it feels like one.
Abandoned Railway Tunnel
For almost twenty years I’ve walked to and from work at the ABC and have passed the abandoned railway tunnel that once was the Ultimo Goods Line.
From time to time I’d peak inside. But until today, I’d never been truly inside tunnel. There’s an art installation currently onsite which I thought would be interesting, though was not all that exciting, to be honest.
It was interesting to walk through the abandoned tunnel, though.
http://newsroom.uts.edu.au/news/2014/04/artist-creates-illuminating-experience-old-tunnel
Sydneysiders will get a rare chance to enter a little-known tunnel in the centre of the city over the next 10 days. Inventive New York-based Australian artist Ian Burns has been quietly working some magic in the disused tunnel, which could eventually be part of The Goods Line public space project in Ultimo. Known for his curious and playful kinetic sculptures, Burns has spent the past 11 weeks as UTS Gallery’s artist-in-residence creating a charismatic new body of work Extended Stage developed especially for the tunnel and its mid-1800s sandstone bridge.
The River’s Up
There was an additional activity to the usual Christmas Day routine in our family: we spent an hour or so driving around looking at the river.
As a result of the constant rain of the last few days (weeks) the Wilson’s River at Lismore has reached minor flood level. With more rain over the next few days, it could reach moderate flood level. Worst case scenario, of course, is a major flood which isn’t entirely out of the question. It’s been raining for a while, the ground is sodden, and there’s a general agreement amongst friends and family here a flood isn’t out of the question, given the similarity between current and previous weather patterns. “It’s just like 74” is the refrain of older relatives, a reference to the biggest recorded flood (actually we had two a few weeks apart) in 1974. At the moment, though, the best way to describe the situation is “the river’s up a bit”.
After waking, opening presents, making a few phone calls and text messages, and having Chistmas Lunch, we headed up to the cemetery, as is usual practice on Christmas Day to visit mum and dad. Most years the cemetery is pretty busy after lunch, this year, with sodden ground, there were only a few visitors in the post-lunch period.
There was more activity around the river and the levee bank, as curiosity got the better of a fair number of people around the town. If you’re a local living away and you’re wondering what’s going on: they’ve closed off the Rowing Club Carpark, there’s water in The Duck Pond, and the river is just below Simes’ Bridge at the moment. Nothing to worry about right now.
Of slightly more concern were the cracks in the levee bank which my niece showed me, and which were apparently fairly heavily discussed in the paper recently.
After our big drive, we came home, a few retired to the couch for a mid-afternoon nap, while my nephew, Sam and I continued to play Wii. He’s better than me at ten-pin-bowling, though I’m getting better. Still, it didn’t stop him saying, with a combined look of frustration and bewilderment “Jim, are you sure you’ve played Wii before?”. Oh the shame of it all :)
Yours is the second oldest blog I read. Well done.
Second oldest? Which is the oldest?