There’s one question strangers always ask Tom Nash: “What happened to you?”
Some days he’ll say it was a shark attack that separated him from his limbs, or maybe a disastrous trapeze incident. If a taxi driver starts prying, he might tell them he used to drive a cab until he had “a horrible accident”. Or there was the time he stepped into a packed elevator and, feeling the weight of curious eyes on him, turned to his friend and deadpanned, “It’s really weird to be back in this elevator – where it all happened.”
The less outlandish truth is that Nash became a quadruple amputee after contracting meningococcal as a teenager. He was in a coma for two-and-a-half weeks, hospitalised for 18 months, and given between a two and 10% chance of survival. Beating the odds, he learned to walk again using prosthetic legs, but found prosthetic arms clumsy to manoeuvre and instead opted for the more practical alternative of metal hooks. His signature appendages earned him the nickname Hookie, the name under which he built a career as a well-known DJ and club promoter. (A supplementary question is often how the hooks work: “In the Uber on the way here, the guy was like, how do you hold a beer with that? That’s his priority.”)
Now, Nash is telling the definitive story of what happened to him in a new memoir, Hook, Line and Sinner. It documents his incredible life so far, from getting sick to dominating Sydney’s nightclubs, launching a new career as public speaker (you may have seen his viral Ted Talk titled The Perks of Being a Pirate) and “the bold decision not to become a Paralympian”. He wanted to offer an antidote to what he views as “inspiration porn” – “I’m the anti that, whatever that is” – and tell an unexpected story. Because while you might often read about the physically disabled running a marathon or shooting hoops, “You never hear about them ending up in nightclubs on LSD, DJing to 500 people.”
Nash also hopes the book reframes expectations of what is possible for someone like him. “I genuinely regard having a disability as an advantage in many ways,” he says. “And sometimes that requires a bit more explanation than just face value.”
Given its subject matter, you might expect Hook, Line and Sinner to be a difficult read. But like its author, the book is frequently funny; prone to dark humour and wry observations on human nature. When I first met Nash a decade ago during my own past life in clubland, he was the guy whose Facebook profile photo was a shot of him with five lit cigarettes in his mouth at once; a charismatic figure who would walk through the club like he owned it and hold court at the kick-on. During our conversation today, in the very different setting of broad daylight on a Friday afternoon, he quotes Nietzsche and references psychological theories between puffs of a black vape (he has ditched the cigs). He’s still quick to the punchline – describing, for instance, quadruple amputation as “just like getting a bad haircut, only it doesn’t grow back”.
He can laugh now, but the journey wasn’t easy. Nash first got sick 10 days after his 19th birthday, in July 2001. It hit like a flu that came on fast: that morning he was at university as usual, by the afternoon he was passed out on his bathroom floor. His stepsister called an ambulance and one of his last memories is a doctor telling him he had the C strain of meningococcal, which induced septicaemia and had advanced to a lethal stage.
His body began to swell. Doctors had to perform a fasciotomy, a surgical procedure where tissue is cut open to give the tissue room to expand, on his arms and legs. Nash was placed on life support, in an induced coma, where he stayed for two-and-a-half weeks.
By the time Nash woke up, gangrene had spread across much of his limbs and his family had been told that he would probably die. He didn’t – but the path back to health was long and arduous.
First, his legs were amputated six inches below the knees. That necessitated a daily changing of his wound dressings, which caused “a pain I never knew existed”. It took about four hours every day for five months to change the dressings, and was so traumatic for Nash that the nurses who were forced to inflict the pain would often leave the room in tears. One, who had only started work in the unit that day, quit during the procedure.
As well as a cocktail of painkillers before procedures, Nash was given midazolam, a drug that induces memory loss, to try to lessen the mental impact of what was happening to him. It “obviously” didn’t work completely. He still remembers lying there listening to Jimi Hendrix’s Live at Monterey, which nurses would blast to try to distract Nash as they pulled the bandages off, his screams muffled by the ineffective nitrous oxide gas mask held to his face.
Next, it came time to deal with the arms. “The doctor entered my room one day and asked me whether I would accept having my arms amputated,” Nash recalls. “He said it in a way that was quite amusing, but poignant at the same time – he said, we can’t force you to make any decisions. But you have two options. You can have your arms amputated, and you’ll live. Or you can keep them.
“I said, ‘OK, and what’s the catch? And he said, the catch is you’ll die.”
What felt important to Nash was that he was being given the choice. “This was one of the first times that I felt like I actually had control over what was happening to me. They couldn’t legally kill me. But I could refuse an operation, that if I did, it would kill me. So if I didn’t feel like I wanted to go on, that was my chance to get out.”
It wasn’t a hard decision to make, something Nash credits to the friends and family who had rallied around him. “The last thing you want to do is let them down.”
During his 18-month stay in hospital, Nash slowly and painfully learned to walk with prosthetics, and use his hooks. When he eventually got out, he applied himself to mastering his new appendages – to find ingenious ways of, say, lighting his own cigarette or making a cup of tea. He didn’t want the appliances made for those with disabilities, believing that his autonomy depended on being able to get by in any setting. He even found a way to play guitar again.
Instead of returning to university to complete his psychology degree, Nash opted to study something different: music. That eventually led him to start a club night called Starfuckers with a friend at Club 77, a den of debauchery just outside Sydney’s Kings Cross. It was a hit: Starfuckers ran as a weekly club night for 12 years (and still returns for occasional events) and the DJ career it spurred took Nash around the globe. Away from the decks, he writes about his relationships, including with model Sydney Barber and his current partner Lauren, who he describes as “the most calming presence I have ever been graced with”. He divides his time between Paris and Sydney, and enjoys cooking, cocktails and photography. His life is, as he writes in the book, a great one.
Now 41, Nash still has one foot in clubland (“figuratively, of course”) and is looking towards the next chapter. As well as becoming an author, he is known as a public speaker. One upcoming event is on universal design. He could simply tell his life story, but Nash wants to explore ideas, not just peddle platitudes.
“I don’t want to be a speaker that just gets up and says, ‘Hey, I’m a quad amputee, and so you can do it too’, which I think is a bullshit idea,” he says. “It doesn’t really provide any value to people, because I don’t necessarily think it’s true.”
But the second act of his career does have Nash reflecting on his journey – and what it takes to overcome adversity more broadly. He takes issue with the concept of resilience (“It’s a buzzword that just annoys me”), preferring to view hardship as an opportunity to grow stronger, rather than something to simply endure.
Nash believes he experienced what is known as post-traumatic growth, a positive psychological change experienced after highly stressful life circumstances. He also thinks he has a more innately happy disposition than most. He believes he is better off for having gone through what he did; more appreciative of his time, his autonomy and the relationships he keeps. When you’ve been both lucky and unlucky, he says, it’s better to anchor towards the luck.
And he’s never short of a good anecdote. A couple of years post-amputation, Nash was visited by a psychology student, enraptured by the prospect of getting to interview a quadruple amputee. When the student asked how he was coping with the loss of his arms, he spotted a golden opportunity.
“It’s a bit of a bummer now, but it’ll be OK when my arms grow back,” he said, straight faced.
The student, masking their concern, furiously took notes.
Hook, Line and Sinner by Tom Nash is published by Penguin ($35)
