For the next nine months or so, I continued living beside the morgue. I had a girlfriend at the time who stayed with me on and off. She was someone I had known for most of my life through the church and had plenty of her own dramas going on. At times, she brought her own form of chaos into a life that was already becoming increasingly complicated. For the purposes of this story, I will call her Zara.

Around the same time, Des gave me a Staffy crossed with an English Bull Terrier puppy. I named him Jake, although he quickly became known as Jake the Muss. From the moment he came into my life, we were inseparable.

Wherever I went, Jake came with me. If I wandered around the property, he followed close behind. If I jumped into my Subaru to go somewhere, Jake was straight in beside me, usually with his head hanging out the window and his face in the wind. He didn't care where we were going. As long as he was coming with me, he was happy.

Living in the bus on a limited income meant I had to become resourceful. Fortunately, there was a company across the creek that dealt with skip-bin removal, so discarded building materials weren't difficult to find. Timber, fittings and anything else that looked remotely useful would make its way back across the creek and into the bus. Other people's rubbish became my building supplies, and slowly I managed to make the old Bedford more comfortable without spending money I didn't have.

By then, the bus had also earned itself a name: the Can-a-Bus.

I was smoking plenty of cannabis and had started selling small quantities to close friends and their friends to supplement my limited income. It wasn't something I'm proud of, but at the time it seemed like something I could manage while trying to understand my illness and what it meant for my ability to work. I wasn't thinking particularly far ahead. I was dealing with whatever problem was directly in front of me.

The morgue remained completely off limits. There was something about that building none of us particularly wanted to investigate. A light outside it would flicker throughout the night, adding to its already creepy appearance. There was probably a perfectly ordinary explanation for it, but an old morgue didn't need much help becoming unsettling after dark.

The rest of the property, however, was fair game. My friends and I would go on missions exploring the old hospital grounds, peering through broken windows, pushing our way through bushes and looking underneath abandoned buildings. There always seemed to be another forgotten corner to investigate.

During one of those missions, we stumbled across a huge cylinder of nitrous oxide. Nitrous oxide, commonly known as laughing gas, has long been used medically for pain relief and anaesthesia, including in hospitals and dentistry. It also has commercial uses, including in whipped-cream dispensers. In Australia, the small cartridges containing nitrous oxide are commonly called "nangs", and the gas is sometimes inhaled recreationally for its brief intoxicating effect.

What we had found was considerably larger than a nang. It looked like a lifetime supply.

Exactly why the cylinder was still there, I don't know. Given that we were exploring the grounds of an old hospital, it wasn't difficult to imagine how medical gas might once have been used on the property, but I have no idea whether that particular cylinder dated back to the hospital or had arrived there sometime later. We weren't particularly interested in its history anyway. We were interested in what was inside it.

Before long, we were getting stoned and inhaling the nitrous oxide, sometimes taking enough that we would briefly black out. We treated it like another adventure without giving much thought to what we were actually doing. Looking back, it was incredibly careless and stupid.

Drug education had played very little part in my life. This was before information could instantly be found on a phone or pushed in front of you through social media. Most of what we thought we knew about drugs came from other people who used them. Someone tried something, told everyone else about it, and before long someone else was having a go. If nothing terrible happened immediately, that was often enough evidence for us to decide it was safe.

Unfortunately, life sometimes provided the education later.

Away from the stupidity and adventures with my friends, things weren't going particularly well for me. My illness had changed the direction of my life, money was tight, and the practical reality of living in the bus was becoming difficult. Even basic things like showering and going to the toilet were a hassle. Facilities were available up at the nurses' quarters, but I never felt comfortable walking up there to use them. What had started as an alternative way of living was becoming harder to deal with as the months went by.

My relationship with Zara wasn't particularly stable either. We had good times, but there were also arguments and plenty of tension. When two people are already carrying their own problems, living together on and off inside an old bus doesn't exactly give either of them much room to escape when things go wrong.

Gradually, I became depressed. I didn't really recognise it for what it was at the time. I simply knew that I was struggling. My future had become uncertain, my body was doing things I couldn't control, and I had no clear idea what I was supposed to do next.

Jake became the one uncomplicated part of my life. He was always pleased to see me. He didn't care what kind of day I was having or what mistakes I had made. Whether we were wandering around Silverstream or driving somewhere in the Subaru with his head hanging out the window, he simply wanted to be beside me.

One day, after another argument with Zara, I reached a point I had never experienced before. Everything felt like too much, and for the first time in my life, I decided I didn't want to keep going.

Inside the bus, I tied a noose around my neck and secured the rope to an interior rail in the ceiling. I dropped onto my knees and felt it tighten brutally around my neck.

Then I heard Jake whimper.

I looked across at him. My little puppy was staring directly at me. He couldn't understand what I was doing, but he knew something was wrong. There was a look in his eyes that I have never forgotten.

For whatever reason, it broke through the darkness in my head. I stood back up and struggled with the rope until I managed to loosen it and pull the noose free from around my neck.

Then I looked at Jake again.

He had no idea what had just happened. He was simply my dog, standing there waiting for his mate. But that little whimper had been enough to make me stand.

Many years later, I can still picture him looking at me inside that bus. Of all the things that could have interrupted that moment, it was Jake.

My little mate.

Jake had just saved my life.