Nicky’s Story On art, being black, and having hep C—and hep C treatment
I
found drugs at the same time as I found black history, which was part of studying for a welfare diploma. I didn’t know that much about my culture, where I’d come from, or my identity before this. All of a sudden I could see how my own family had been through history. I lost my mother when I was 13 from a drug overdose and there was a lot of drug, alcohol and violence in the community. I could see there were reasons for this that I’d never realised. I started to reflect a lot. Unfortunately, at the same time I was studying, I was introduced to drugs as well. I began to question why I was studying welfare when I had so many problems to sort out from my background. I think in a lot of ways I used drugs to medicate myself. Speed was my drug of choice, and when I was on it. I felt confident, as though I could handle anything. When I wasn’t, I felt hopeless and confused. Hep C was a positive thing in some ways, a wake-up call to change my life. When I was diagnosed, I could see straight away that hep C was a direct consequence of what I was doing, how I was living. I’d never thought about
my health, never thought about how important it was to my living. I was just into drugs and drinking. Looking back, I had three options opening up for me: homelessness, prison or death. My life was in chaos. I freaked out when I got the diagnosis over the phone, because I thought it was a death sentence, and that I would never be able to have children. There wasn’t much information available about hep C then. This made me get into drugs a lot heavier, but eventually your body kicks in, takes over, and says, “Nah, you’re really sick!” So eventually I stopped using. It was tough. I had the physical symptoms of withdrawing from the drug. It was weird; for a while whenever anyone mentioned speed it was like my body would go into a sort of jolt, like it was remembering the effects of speed. I also had to withdraw from most of my friends and spend a lot of time alone. I did feel very lonely at times, but I knew that I didn’t want to go back, and I knew that the people I did drugs with weren’t “real mates”.
I remember one day my uncle (Mum’s brother) arrived at my door, without saying much he put me in the car and drove me eight hours back to family land near Gladstone. He’d heard on the grapevine that I wasn’t good. He got a couple of his friends to take me out fishing every day to keep my mind off things, and he gave me fish to eat, day in, day out for a month. I think he thought it would be healing, and it was.
Hepatitis C Community News • March 2010
I’d already started some counselling through an Indigenous health service and this helped because before I even knew I had hep C, I had begun to slowly question my drug use and how I could reduce it. I used rehab and went to Narcotics Anonymous. When I came out of rehab, I felt drawn to go to church one day. I’d gone to a Catholic school as a kid. I remember going up the steep hill to the church, noticing a syringe lying on the ground, and I remember I carried on walking, putting it behind me. I ended up dropping out of the welfare course. Someone saw me doodling one day on a piece of paper; I used to sit around and doodle a lot, and they said, “Why don’t you study art?” There was a course at the Koori Institute of Education, (part of Deakin University) in Melbourne. There was a lot of support there, and the study was organised in blocks so you could still live at home and they flew us in to do the courses. So I did that, and after a few years, I graduated with a BA (Fine Art).
Even though I was still using for part of this course, it’s true that art formed a big part of my road to recovery. At first I found it hard to be open about my hep C. I didn’t talk to anyone about it, but I went to a support group, and it was good to hear other people talk about their difficulties living with hep C; about the symptoms, about not being able to get through a day without a nap, that sort of thing. I had a friend who was working in the community and she was