"I will never be the same as I was before." Grace Tame's story, in her own words.

The following is an excerpt from The Ninth Life of a Diamond Miner: A memoir by Grace Tame.

It was a blistering summer’s day, February 1, 2022. I was ignoring all of the advice from everyone around me to slow down. I’d been to visit my old English teacher, Janet, who lives in Opossum Bay, and was riding home. I had already ridden 100 kilometres that week and it was only Tuesday. I was riding for exercise because I’d fractured my foot running two months before, and my pelvis six months before that.

I hadn’t eaten much that day. Not enough to compensate for the energy I was burning, at least. It was all in the name of self-care; I insisted. I was taking time for myself amid all the chaos of public life. I knew what I was doing. I was on home turf. I’d ridden this route before. The worst part, I thought, was already behind me, when I had made it safely across the Speaks Bay neck and out of the midday crosswind. Anticipating the steep climb that awaited me, I shifted into high gear and descended the hill just before the turnoff to Gellibrand Drive at top speed in the hopes of building some momentum. The road was smooth and hot under my thin tyres. The turn was a sharp dogleg dotted with loose gravel where the highway met the back road.

As soon as my bike tipped, I could feel time begin to stretch. Adrenaline screamed before I did. I knew I was going to hit the ground. I couldn’t fight. I let myself fall. 'Ah' and 'f*ck' were the only two words I could say out loud. I repeated them a few times, still underneath and attached to the metal frame of the 17-year-old triathlon bike, lying on the highway. 'You’re all right,' I told myself privately, 'if something was broken, you’d be crying.' After a minute or so of inertia, I freed my feet, moved the bike, and sat myself down on a slab of concrete on the corner. I’d ridden in just my shorts and crop because of the heat and my left side was now a mess of dirt and running blood from gravel rash. On my way up, before the descent, I’d passed an old man on a push bike who stopped briefly when he reached me to see if I was okay and kindly check my chain. I told him I only had about 30 kilometres to go. I was planning to ride home. I just needed to collect myself. The ripping feeling inside my chest would surely subside soon enough. I would just have to be mindful not to turn my head that way. Or breathe too deeply. Or lift my arm like that. Or move too suddenly.

Not long after the other rider left, an orange and yellow–panelled dune buggy pulled up. The driver was a white-haired, beach-swept man in a short-sleeved button-down. He offered me a lift. He seemed harmless, but I was keen to keep moving. I told the man I was planning to make my own way back to Rokeby. 'You can’t ride like that,' he said. 'No way.' The adrenaline in my system was starting to wane. I’d carried my phone in a pocket between my shoulder blades, but we were out of range in the bush. I’d sent some messages to Max and tried to call him but nothing was going through.

My upper left side was giving me grief and messing with my thinking. It was starting to sink in that I might not be able to get back on the bike, let alone ride it. I could hardly make a fist. The man was very kind and kept insisting that he take me home. In the end, I accepted. I asked what his name was, and he guessed mine. When we were in the car, he told me he had seen me on the news.

Later that day at the ER, a scan revealed my clavicle was broken but not displaced, so they put me in a sling and sent me home with a week’s worth of Endone. With the healthcare system under strain from the pandemic, there was no attending orthopaedic surgeon there to see me at the time. I was told someone would ring me in the coming days to book an appointment at the hospital’s fracture clinic. The call never came.

On February 9, I had to give an address at the National Press Club in Canberra, with Brittany Higgins. By then, the opioids had run out, and the ripping sensation I’d been feeling inside me was getting worse and more frequent. The swelling had gone down but only slightly. Max’s mum, Andrea, kindly gave me some of her leftover ibuprofen and Comfarol Forte to see if that might help. It made me a bit groggy but the sharpness of the pain remained. Sleeping was nearly impossible. The sling was as irritating as all get-out and I kept taking it off to get relief. On the morning of the speech, I took some ibuprofen, knowing I could handle that without slurring my words, and hoped the sling wouldn’t bother me.

After we got back to Hobart, Max noticed a white bump on my collarbone. I took myself back to the ER on February 13 and asked for another scan. As I suspected, my collarbone was now no longer intact. I don’t have seven years of medical school under my belt, but I have two eyes, albeit not 20/20 ones. The orthopaedic surgeon told me there was an 83 per cent chance my shoulder would heal on its own, so I decided not to bother with surgery. I would wait it out instead. So long as I could eventually get back to running, riding and swimming, I was content. 

Yes, the doctor reassured me, I would be able to. I clearly needed a rest and this might have been the only way my stubborn self was going to be forced to take one.

'You’re not a shot-putter, though?' he asked, which was almost funny enough to make me want to take it up.

How fitting, after the year I had in 2021, that I wound up quite literally shattered. Of all the injuries I could have got, that was perhaps the most powerfully symbolic of them all.

First off, the clavicle – unlike most other bones in the human body – can’t simply be set in a cast to heal without disturbance. Much like child sexual abuse, it’s a trauma you can’t isolate. There’s nothing that can be done to stop it from being re-aggravated and worsening while you attempt to recover. It connects to so many other parts of your whole being. It’s a total disruption to and of the self.

Secondly, when I first had the accident, the bone did not actually completely break upon impact, much like a person at the onset of an emotional trauma. Instead, over those 13 days, in a way I couldn’t control, it slowly but surely snapped, splintering and splitting into two pieces inside me, leaving a half-centimetre gap between them.

And then there’s the fact that there is now a part of me that will always be misaligned, misshapen, out of place. There’ll always be a bump; there’ll always be something there that wasn’t there before. Not something that defines me, but something that will inevitably affect most of the things I do from here on out, for the rest of my life, even if only in ways so small I don’t notice.

Nonetheless, I will never be the same as I was before. For worse. And for better. To create a bright future, we must value the lessons of our past.

For the most part of the past 12 months – for the past 12 years, in fact – I have been carrying immense pain, only now there are also signs of it beginning to show physically. Of course, my past isn’t to blame for my busted shoulder, but the two stresses aren’t entirely unrelated. That said, if I were to visually translate the complex trauma of child sexual abuse and all its other resulting, compounding, re-traumatising manifestations – it would look a lot worse than just one snapped collarbone and some patches of gravel rash.

More to the point, it would be impossible to capture all of it in just one single image. Every incarnation of trauma; every reinvention of the vulnerable, hanging-by-a-thread survivor unconsciously stuck in the cycle of self-destruct, bottom out, rebuild, and repeat. There is simply no way to show all the cumulative layers of hurt, sandwiched between happiness and unspoiled childhood memories.

There is just so much that we don’t see. Beneath the surface.

The Ninth Life of a Diamond Miner by Grace Tame. Published by Macmillan Australia. RRP $49.99 hardcover. Available from 27 September 2022.

Image: Supplied.

Feature Image: AAP.

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