The Complete Book of Australian Flying Doctor Stories (14 page)

You’ve got to remember that at that stage my wife, Penny, and I were in our mid to late twenties. We were totally invincible. Nothing could happen to us. We’d go out and do anything. It really didn’t matter. It was just one of those things. It was a job that you just had to do because people needed you. So you went and did it. And of course with the RFDS pilot and nursing sister living together, as a team we were simply brilliant. The phone would ring and I’d elbow Penny in the side and say, ‘Come on, we’ve got to go.’

Like the night we went to pick up that guy out of Wyndham. They phoned around midnight. ‘We’ve got a bad one here,’ they said. So I gave Penny a nudge and we were out of bed in a shot and into the plane in about twenty minutes. I fired the monster up, then we went like a bat out of hell for Wyndham.

What had happened was that there’s this very beautiful little place at Wyndham called The Grotto. It’s a waterhole set in steep granite walls and cliffs rising to about 100 feet high. It’s completely sheltered, and it’s always running with crystal clear water which is gorgeously cool even in the middle of the hottest day. Everybody used to go swimming there.

Anyway, these people got full of booze and wandered out there at night. Then this guy decided that he’d take the easy way down so he dived off the top of the cliff. The only drawback was that he landed in about two inches of water.

Honestly, it was like picking up a bag of jelly. It was terrible. Shocking. We never did much of what they call ‘stabilising’ in those days. It was all ‘run and catch’ where we picked the patients up and flew them to a hospital as quick as we could. And this guy had broken everything that it was possible to break.

Then when we got him on board the aeroplane, they said, ‘Look, you’re going to have to take him to Perth.’

‘Bullshit,’ I said, ‘he’ll never make it to Perth. Call Darwin and tell them we’re coming.’

‘No, you can’t go to Darwin,’ they argued. ‘Darwin won’t accept you.’

‘Pig’s arse, they won’t,’ I said. ‘Just tell ’em we’re coming.’

So I took off and headed straight to Darwin and we put down on the airstrip just as dawn was breaking. Thankfully an ambulance was there to meet us. As we unloaded this guy I said to Penny, ‘Well, Pen, we’ll never see him again.’

Three months later he walked off a Fokker Friendship back in Wyndham. Absolutely, bloody unbelievable.

Being a doctor, a lot of the stories that I have are of a medical or technical nature. They’re not real humorous so I’m not sure that they’ll have much appeal. I’d just like to say that if anything exemplifies what the Royal Flying Doctor Service is about, it’s skills and teamwork. No one along the line of operations is either more or less important than the other. It doesn’t matter if you’re a doctor, a nurse, pilot, radio technician, engineer-mechanic or whatever, we’ve all got our own particular skills. We’ve all got to pull our weight. If one link in that chain falters, so does the whole operation.

I’ll give you an example just to demonstrate what I mean. We had a call one day that there’d been a motor vehicle accident out on the Ivanhoe to Hay road, about 80 plane-kilometres from Ivanhoe. The police who were at the scene informed us that there were two very critically injured people and one who was not so bad.

The problem was that there weren’t any airstrips nearby so we either had to motor the injured out or we had to get in there somehow and land on the road.

Now, there’s certain criteria for landing on a road. Firstly, it has to be declared an emergency and has to be approved by the Aviation Safety Authority. Then there must be a straight stretch of road of at least two kilometres. It must be more than amply wide enough. All the guard posts have to be knocked down. No culverts. The camber of the road must be such that it won’t affect the safety of the plane’s landing. The road
must be blocked at either end by the police. Also the wind has to be in the right direction, that’s as well as the usual landing conditions.

Normally, we only take one crew in the plane, along with the pilot. A crew consists of a nurse and a doctor. But in this case the injuries were such that we decided to take two crews. That made a total of five people, including the pilot.

Then as we were about to land we were informed that one of the victims had just died. This caused us to have a rethink about the situation, taking into account the high risk involved in landing on a road at the best of times. But there was still one patient down there who was in a critical condition so we decided to go ahead.

When we landed, and very successfully I might add, it struck me just how skilful the pilot was. It was an impressive feat. He’d just taken a King Air plane worth $4 to $5 million, weighing 5 tons or so, with five of us on board, and landed the thing dead square at 180 kilometres per hour on a bush road. What’s more, I noticed later that he had only about 18 inches (that’s 30 centimetres) to spare on each side of the plane’s wheels to the verge of the road.

That’s what I mean about skills. Amazing.

Still and all, in that particular case things didn’t turn out well. The remaining critically injured patient unfortunately died while we were attempting to resuscitate him. We were able to fix up the not-so-injured person without too much problem. In that patient’s case, time wasn’t such a vital factor. So the police took us all into Ivanhoe, leaving the pilot free to take off with an empty plane — because of the safety factor once again.

So, as I said, the Royal Flying Doctor Service is all about working as a team where everyone uses their own particular skills to the best of their abilities.

Everyone relies on each other and, even then, you can have all the skills, expertise and teamwork in the world but time’s against you. It’s especially sad when there’s young children involved.

That’s a real tragedy, a tragedy beyond words.

There was one poor feller who lived out near Lake Stewart, up in the far north-western corner of New South Wales.

Anyway, it was a very hot night. The moon was full. As bright as a street lamp, it was. This feller and his wife were sleeping outside in the hopes of catching any breeze that might happen to drift by. During the night he rolled over, and that’s when he felt something scratch his back, razor sharp it was. Initially, he thought it was the cat but, when he turned over to shoo the thing away, he made out the deadly form of a snake slithering off in the direction of the chooks’ coop. So he dashed inside, got his shotgun, charged back outside, and started firing into the chooks’ coop in an attempt to kill the snake before it got away.

Of course, all this noise woke his wife. When she saw her husband blasting away into the chooks’ coop, with her precious hens flying left, right and centre, and him calling out, ‘I’ll get yer, yer dirty bastard!’, she drew the conclusion that the poor bloke had finally cracked. He hadn’t been himself lately. What with the extreme isolation, the extreme heat, the extremely full moon, and the extremities of their current economic concerns — all these things had eventually caused him to go off his rocker.

So there was this chap’s wife telling him off, yelling at him to stop slaughtering her chooks, and him still
blasting away, mumbling something about how he was trying to kill a snake that’d just bitten him.

‘Well, where’s the snake then?’ she shouted.

He stopped firing and when the dust had settled they peered through the moonlight. No sign of a snake. So he showed her his back. The wife took a look and saw a couple of deep scratch marks.

‘You’ve been scratched by the cat,’ she said.

‘It were a snake,’ he replied.

‘A cat,’ she said.

‘A snake,’ he replied.

This went on for a while, with his wife arguing that he’d been scratched by the cat which, in turn, had caused him to lose his marbles and shoot up her chooks, and him declaring that he was in full control of his marbles and that a snake had bitten him and, what’s more, he’d seen it slither into the chooks’ coop which was why he was shooting in that direction.

With both of them finally agreeing to disagree, he put in a call to the Flying Doctor. The doctor advised that the best thing for him to do was to drive into Tibooburra and get the nurse to have a look. ‘Okay,’ he said and he headed off to Tibooburra, leaving his wife behind to tally up the dead in her chooks’ coop.

But his troubles didn’t stop there. By the time the chap got to Tibooburra the snake venom had started to take effect. So when the nurse was disturbed at some ungodly hour by a bloke with a very slurry voice banging on her door, she assumed that he was drunk. It’d happened before. Blokes getting a skinful and knocking on her door. Usually, they weren’t too much of a problem. All she had to do was tell them to get lost
and they’d wander off, most of the time not knowing what they’d done in the sober light of day.

But this drunk was different. No matter how many times she told him to get lost, he still wouldn’t budge from her door. Then when the chap started ranting and raving about how he needed to see the nurse because his wife didn’t understand him, she rang the police.

So before the chap knew it, he was being apprehended.

‘Yer got it all wrong. I’ve been bit b’ a snake,’ he protested groggily.

‘That’s the best one I’ve heard in a long time,’ replied the policeman.

While all this kerfuffle was going on, the doctor had been attempting to get through to let the nurse know that the chap coming in from Lake Stewart had a suspected snake bite, and could she keep him under close observation. The problem was that the nurse didn’t hear the call. It was only after the chap had been carted off that the doctor made contact. Yet, even then, the nurse didn’t twig. In fact, during the conversation she complained to the doctor about the hell of a night she was having. How it was as hot as Hades and then, just as she had finally got to sleep, some drunk started banging on her door and she’d had to call the police to come and cart him off.

Anyway, the chap went from bad to worse during the night which caused everyone to reassess his situation and he was flown to hospital the next day.

Nearly died, he did.

It turned out to be the most wonderful experience. But it certainly didn’t start that way, especially with a neighbour’s wife ringing me one night, from out past Rawlinna, saying that her husband had come a cropper off his motor bike.

‘Well,’ she said, when I asked about the extent of his injuries, ‘fer starters, all his head’s scalped back, like.’

This didn’t sound too promising for the bloke, not at all. What’s more, I surmised that the chap had received multiple head injuries, which proved to be right. The thing was that, as a nurse, I could only do so much. For him to get the proper treatment for the injuries he’d sustained we had to get him into a hospital, and as soon as possible.

Timing was always going to be the critical factor as to whether he lived or died. So I got in touch with the Flying Doctor at Kalgoorlie and asked them to fly out to Haig immediately — Haig was the closest airstrip to the chap’s homestead, out along the railway track. The problem then was that it’d take me at least two hours to drive out to the property along the railway service road, then bring the patient back to Haig to meet the plane. Mind you, out along the Nullarbor the service roads are terrible travelling at the best of times.

But luck was with me. The Road Master at Rawlinna stepped in and offered his help. And that’s what saved the bloke’s life. See, the Road Master had a Toyota Hilux which, as well as having normal tyres
for road use, had also been specially fitted with steel wheels so that it could run on railway tracks. So he put the Toyota up on the hydraulics gismo, which was situated under the vehicle, and jacked it down on the railway track.

Just before we headed off I asked my hubby to gather everyone together and go out to Haig and light the airstrip with little kerosene lanterns — ‘flares’ we call them — so the plane could see where to land.

The next thing I knew we were hurtling along the railway track at 100 kilometres an hour with the Road Master fiddling around, getting things ready to place the injured chap in.

‘Look, no hands,’ he said as a sort of joke. He must have seen the shock on my face because he was quick to add, ‘Don’t worry. It’s so flat out here that, from when you first see a train’s light until it reaches you, well, you can allow a couple of hours at least.’

Anyway, that particular problem didn’t arise because within twenty minutes we were as close to the injured bloke’s homestead as we could get by rail. So the Road Master lifted the Toyota off the track and onto its normal tyres ready to drive the couple of kilometres to the homestead.

When we got there the bloke was a real mess, worse than what I’d first imagined. Things were touch and go. I patched him up the best I could and we put him in the back of the Hilux before we transported him back across country to the railway line. That was the roughest part of his journey. Once we were there the Road Master put his vehicle back on the railway track and we headed off the 30 or so kilometres to Haig.

I must say that I was deeply concerned for the life of the accident victim. But just as we were about to take the Toyota off the track at Haig, a bright light appeared in the sky, out to the north. I forget who was helping me in the back of the vehicle, but I remember saying, ‘God, what’re those lights?’ Then it dawned on me. ‘Oh hell,’ I said, ‘it’s the plane. It’s just coming in to land!’

So we dropped the wheels again and drove straight out to the airstrip. I tell you, with all the turmoil of that particular night, the arrival of the plane couldn’t have been more spot-on. It was like we’d rehearsed it a million times over. Then when the doctor got out of the plane, a female it was, she must have been pretty new to the game, well, she reckoned that the scene looked like something out of the television show ‘The Flying Doctors’. There it was, about half-past eleven, twelve at night, and there were all the neighbours who’d come along to help light up the airstrip with flares.

So they flew the bloke straight out to Perth where they fixed him up. And though he had a really bad time of it, with long-term memory loss and whatnot, he’s as good as gold now. No problems. He’s got two more kids and, what’s more, he’s back on the job, riding that bloody great big motor bike of his, the same one that bucked him off.