The Complete Book of Australian Flying Doctor Stories (55 page)

My name is now Clemson, though O’Connor was my maiden name when I was working as an Emergency flight nurse for the Royal Flying Doctor Service, out in the west of New South Wales, at both Broken Hill and Dubbo. These days I’m married and we’re living on a property just outside Walgett, in the central north of New South Wales. But I was with the Flying Doctor Service for nine years and I enjoyed every moment of it…well, almost…because during my time with the RFDS we had to deal with many and varied incidents. Some you could draw humour from. Some were tough to take. So it was not always easy, no.

Now I know that tragic stories don’t make for the best of reading but I do remember one time at Moomba, up in the north-eastern corner of South Australia. The Flying Doctor Service had the contract at the Moomba oil and gas fields so we used to go out there and it was absolutely amazing — the harshness of the place and just how unbelievably hot it can get. And this story really brings that sort of thing home to you.

Anyhow, they had a bloke out there who was new to the job so he wasn’t acclimatised and so he was unaware of the damage that that sort of scorching heat can do to you. Now, I can’t remember what his actual job was but he was working about 100 foot up in the air, doing something on one of those big rigs they’ve got, and he was out in the sun for about three hours without drinking enough water. So it was
purely dehydration that got him because someone just happened to look up and there he was, hanging upside down in a safety harness, swinging in midair and he was fitting (having a fit).

That’s when we got the call to fly out and get him. In the meantime, the nurses that were based up at Moomba, they had to somehow get up this big rig and they had to go out to where he was hanging to get the drip into him and then get him down. It was just from him purely being overcooked. And actually he was very lucky to even be alive because his whole body had virtually collapsed. He had muscle meltdown. His kidneys were shutting down. He was bleeding from absolutely every orifice. Everything. Then when we arrived we had to ventilate him, and it was difficult because we couldn’t see for all the blood that was pouring out of him from everywhere. In all, it took probably eight hours to stabilise him.

So we flew him down to Adelaide and when we got there we got him into the ambulance and we had an emergency police escort from the airport into Royal Adelaide Hospital. Oh, we had all the lights flashing and all the sirens blaring — everything. They even shut the traffic lights off so that we could get him to the hospital quicker. Then, when we got to the hospital, all the lifts were opened for us, and I think they worked on him for another three or four hours. After that he had to be put on dialysis and then he was on ventilators for a long time.

And now he’s back at Moomba. He’s just doing light duties, mind you. He might still have a few problems but he’s a very lucky man to still be alive, with what he went through. So that was a very difficult one,
particularly for the nurses at Moomba who had to get right out of their comfort zone and get up the rig and treat the man while he was hanging upside down and fitting in midair. I mean, you really have to admire people with a commitment like that, don’t you?

Then there’s another story. This one’s also about someone who had to get out of their comfort zone to help a patient, though in a different sort of way. Actually, I’m reminded of this story because just last night we had a storm out here at Walgett. We only had about forty points or something but it was bad enough to cut the power and cut the road. Mind you, the rain’s nice and welcome, that’s for sure.

But talking about rain reminds me of the time when I was working for the RFDS in Broken Hill and a woman rang us from a property up near the Queensland border. In this case this woman had very little medical knowledge. Apparently they’d had a lot of rain up there and her husband had been out riding his motor bike and it had slipped from underneath him and he’d fallen off, damaging his leg. Unfortunately, they only had a dirt airstrip on their property so we couldn’t fly in there at the time, because it was too wet. So we then had to try and instruct the husband’s wife, over the telephone, as to what to do and how to go about it.

As I said this woman had very limited medical knowledge but from her description of the injuries her husband had obviously broken the leg, and the break was both the tibia and fibula; yes, both of them. In fact, it was a compound fracture, meaning that bone was sticking out which, as you might be able to imagine, was causing the husband a lot of pain and the woman a lot of anxiety.

So, first we had to treat the pain. For that the woman had to give her husband an injection of pethidine, which was kept in the RFDS medical chest. The only trouble was that she’d never given a needle before. Oh, I think perhaps she might’ve given a few jabs to some of their cattle or something which, mind you, as it turned out, proved to be a very good training ground. So initially we instructed her how to give the injection for the pain, and she managed that.

The next problem was that, from what she’d told us, it was obvious that the foot wasn’t getting enough blood to it. She described the foot as being ‘cold and white’. Of course, we didn’t want to lose the foot, so after her husband had settled down a bit from the pethidine we had to reduce the fracture in an attempt to keep up the blood flow. Now, to reduce the fracture, the woman had to manually — physically — put the bone back into alignment. And she had to do it all by herself, and unpractised, because there was nobody out there to help her. There was just her and her husband. The only help she had was us, and we were miles away on the end of a telephone.

So we told her how to manipulate the bone back into alignment, which is done by pulling and pulling, as hard as she could, until the bone pops back into place. Naturally, she was a bit apprehensive at first but, with the fate of her husband’s foot in the balance, she eventually gathered up the courage and in fact, as it turned out, she managed to do that quite well too. So she got the bone back into alignment and then, because she didn’t plaster it or anything like that, she had to keep the leg elevated by putting it on a pillow. Once that was done it was important to keep the
husband resting. Then throughout the night she had to keep checking for the pulse, just to make sure that blood was still getting down into the foot. All during this time she was in constant contact with us.

Of course, before we could get the aeroplane in there to pick up her husband and get him back to the Broken Hill Hospital, we had to wait until the airstrip was safe enough for us to land. As it happened, they didn’t get any more rain that night and so things looked promising. So the next morning she had to somehow get her husband out of the house and into a vehicle and then drive out and check the condition of the airstrip. She also had to clear the kangaroos from off the strip and check for any holes and twigs or sticks or logs that might get in our way.

Anyhow, after she gave us the all-clear, we flew in there. By then it was about twenty-four hours after the accident. And the woman had done a great job. The leg was looking really good and her husband was relatively pain free. The only trouble was, it’d obviously been a very long and harrowing ordeal for the woman because she looked like absolute hell.

If you like, first of all I’ve got a story here that’s a little bit humorous. It’s one that, these days, has almost become part of Flying Doctor Service folklore because you’ll hear it, or differing versions of it, being told in just about every pub around western Queensland. What’s more, it’s a true story. That’s what I’ve been told, anyway.

Now, I haven’t got an exact date but at one time the Charleville base of the RFDS received a call from a ringer, and the ringer said, ‘Doc, yer gotta come real quick. Me mate’s hurt his hand real bad.’

Anyhow, in an attempt to find out how the accident happened, and to get a clearer idea as to just how badly the ringer’s mate’s hand was damaged, the doctor tried to extract a little bit more information out of the ringer. But, with ringers being ringers and ringers, more often than not, being men of extremely few words, the doctor couldn’t get much more information out of him other than his mate had ‘hurt his hand real bad’ and that the doctor had better ‘come real quick’.

So they jumped into the plane and off they went. After they landed at the particular station property where the accident had occurred, they rushed to the scene and there was this ringer, the one with the damaged hand, sitting there looking sad and sorry and forlorn and the other ringers were sort of sheepishly standing around behind him. Anyhow, the
doctor walked up to the injured ringer and said, ‘Show me your hand, son.’

Which he did. He lifted his hand up and his thumb was totally missing. It was gone.

‘Where’s your thumb?’ the doctor asked.

Well, the injured ringer, who was also a man of few words, didn’t say anything but simply motioned towards his mates. So the doctor said to his mates, ‘Where’s his thumb? What’ve you done with his thumb?’

‘Oh,’ one of them said, ‘we stuck it over there, on the gatepost, fer safe keepin’.’

And just as doctor turned around to the gatepost, he saw a crow heading skyward, thumb and all. So I don’t know how the ringer had actually lost his thumb in the first place, but it had certainly gone missing after the crow had flown off with it.

So that’s one story. But I suppose that every time I go out to the bush I come back with another story and this one came about when we were putting together a promotional DVD for the Royal Flying Doctor Service. There was just myself, the director and a cameraman, and we’d based ourselves at Mount Isa and we were filming right up to Bentinck and Sweers Islands. Bentinck and Sweers Islands are just off Burketown, into the Gulf of Carpentaria.

But where this story actually comes from is Burketown itself, and I thought it was rather beautiful. The lady that looks after the Burketown Clinic — if you like, she’s the registered nurse there — her name is Glenda. She’s an Aborigine, and we fly in there once a week and conduct a clinic. Now Burketown, as you may well know, is a very remote location. Just check it up on your map.

So we were there filming in Burketown and the director happened to ask Glenda, ‘Seeing that you’re the only one with any form of medical expertise out here in this remoteness, in a situation of an accident of a night time, how do you handle it all on your own?’

And Glenda said to the director, ‘Well, first I patch them up as best I can. Next, I call the Flying Doctor and then I go out to the airstrip and I look up at the stars and just wait for one to get bigger.’

When John Flynn died in 1951, my father, Fred McKay, took over his position of Superintendent of the Australian Inland Mission. When that happened we moved from Brisbane down to Sydney. Then we’d only been in Sydney for about a year or so and there were some financial problems or other within the organisation of the AIM. I was a bit too young to know all the details about it but it’s been well documented. Anyhow, in amongst all that, they were having problems getting staff for the AIM’s Bush Mother’s Hostel, up in Alice Springs. So my mother, Meg McKay, volunteered her services to be Matron — gratis — and so we all moved up to Alice Springs. By all, I mean it was really just my mother, my elder sister, my brother and myself because Dad still had all his other AIM duties to attend to, so he was coming and going a lot.

The Bush Mother’s Hostel was in Adelaide House. That’s in Todd Street. It’s a National Trust building now, like a museum. And I guess that you know all about how John Flynn actually helped redesign the hostel, with the wide verandahs and the natural sort of air conditioning. That was where the air came up from a tunnel under the building, to cool the place down. I would’ve only been twelve or so, at that stage, but back then Alice Springs was quite a small town. I’d say that there would’ve only been about two or three thousand people. They’d just built their first high school, the year
before we went up there, and so I was in the first group of students to go to that new high school.

But it was a fascinating place and it just seemed to me that Alice Springs encapsulated a great range of people — people who were all unique, in their own sorts of ways. You know, everyone seemed to be a character who lived their character. And there’s books out now about some of these people where they’re described as being ‘outback heroes and outback identities’.

One lady in particular comes to mind. Her name was Olive Pink. At that time I didn’t have a clue as to what Olive did but you’d always see her looking like she was someone out of Edwardian England. Wherever she went, she wore these long white dresses, with a white hat and a white scarf, and gloves. And in a place like Alice Springs that was very much a look that was out of place. But, as I said, while I was there I didn’t know what she did and since then I’ve learnt that she was a quite well known conservationist and environmentalist. Apparently she was very instrumental in opening up and saving a lot of the native vegetation throughout that area. There’s even the Olive Pink Memorial Gardens there now and I believe she helped establish a lot of that garden herself. But when you’re only in your early teenage years…well, my memories of her were just of seeing her around town and thinking what a strange lady she was.

Then when they started to build the John Flynn Church, Dad was back a lot more because he was supervising the building. So we watched the John Flynn Church being built. And if you’re ever up that way, it’s well worth a visit, not only because of its basic structure, but there’s also a lot of symbolism in the
actual building, which is something that a lot of people don’t realise. It’s set out like a story of the life of John Flynn and his achievements.

Anyway, I always thought it was just interesting, how some of the things Dad did in Alice Springs seemed to have had far-reaching effects for different people. There was another feller called Ted Smith. Ted didn’t have any work but he owned a truck. He was married with two kids. So he was struggling to make a go of things. Then, in the early days of getting the church under way, he sort of turned up one day and offered Dad any help he could give. Of course, back then everything was being shipped up from Adelaide. But just at that point in time there was some sort of big transport problem or other and this Ted Smith arrived just at the right time, with this truck, and saved Dad a momentous problem. And that set Ted Smith up in Alice Springs. He helped Dad out with the building of the church, then he went on to become a very, very highly respected businessman who had this very prolific business, not only in transport but I think he also diversified into other areas.

But us kids, we thought that the whole thing was all just one big adventure because there were times when we’d go out from Alice Springs on different trips with Dad, and we’d camp out on the ground, with the flies and the mosquitoes and everything else, and that was just an accepted part of our lives. And talking about going out camping and some of the people of Alice Springs: something that always amazed me was that while Dad was overseeing the building of the John Flynn Church he was always looking for local materials to build it with. Anyhow, there’s quite a bit of a special type of pink marble in the church, and I remember going out
in the truck with Dad one time and he’d especially asked these two old Aboriginal fellas to come out and help him find some of this pink marble. So there we were, driving around, away out in the middle of nowhere, north of Alice Springs somewhere, and all of a sudden these old Aborigines told Dad to stop. So he did, and they pointed to a place.

‘Over there,’ they said.

To me, all the rocks looked exactly the same. But when we took a closer look, there it was. And you would have never known that there was pink marble there until you’d started chipping away at the rock. But somehow…and don’t ask me how…they just knew it was there.