1001 Nights Cast

I missed the first broadcast.

I was in Melbourne that Tuesday and returned home to Bendigo about 10.30 p.m. I had remembered during the day, that it must be starting soon. So I logged onto the website and there were seven hours, eighteen minutes to the first performance of the project. It would come online at 9.58 p.m. Paris time, 5.58 a.m. Bendigo time. I set my alarm and went to bed at 11.00 p.m. It was cold. I had trouble sleeping the night before. At 12.30 a.m. I got up and had a shower, washed the fudge out of my hair, took half a sleeping pill and went back to bed. The alarm rang…and I had that thought…just a couple more minutes. When I surfaced again it was 6.30 a.m. Shit. Logged on, the next performance #2 will be at 9.58 p.m…I had missed it. I read the story. It was a story that was somewhat familiar to me…when a friend of mine was told that her partner had been killed, run over by a train, while attempting to rescue their dog…the police coming to the door…her wanting them to go away…The prompt for that night’s story ‘the challenge of healing’…where it all began…

Now, up to part 179 of the story…I wonder how the healing is going…

Prompt for today: right index finger.

Where is it pointing?

I had always thought I was like Mum. Now I think, I am probably more like Dad. My legs are getting more like his.

It was the 50th reunion of his graduating Medical Class, the class of ’55. I went along.

‘Your Dad, is one of life’s characters.’ If only someone had told us. It would have put things in context.

There were 120 graduates, 12 of which were women. At the Medical School in Dunedin at that time they trained all doctors for the whole of New Zealand. After graduation they fanned out, to registrar jobs in hospitals large and small or to take up positions as rural GP’s mainly, in remote places where they had to do everything: deliver babies, give anaesthetics, ‘meat-ball’ surgery. Then later they fanned out further, to Australia and various locations in the South Pacific, mostly.

Joe went farming for 25 years after he graduated, only returning to ‘Medcine’ (as they pronounce it) at the age of 50. He still practices, after training at the age of 60 in musculo-skeletal medicine. Eleven of the class who turned up for the reunion are still registered and still practicing, at the age of 75 plus.

Heather, delivered 4,000 babies in the largest solo General Practice in the South Island. A ‘good receptionist’ she said, was her greatest professional asset. Bronwyn went to the UK as a consultant paediatrician and still knits, she told us. The ‘roll call’, with each of the graduates at the reunion rising to give a potted history of their course over the last 50 years, continued…

Ray talked about the miraculous development of contact lenses which he had been wearing since 1954. Laurie spoke of how he went to work in Malawi and became ‘disillusioned’ by AIDS. There was the hair transplant specialist from Adelaide (with a hair transplant), and the guy who had worked for 20 years in a TB hospital in China with a holistic care approach. Then, in his most satisfying medical experience, he worked with Vietnamese asylum seekers in a detention camp of 10,000 people on an island in Hong Kong. ‘They were in need and couldn’t shop around. We provided twenty-four hour care with full government support.’

Pat, took ‘a third world job in south Auckland’. After the army, Brian worked in a leprosarium somewhere in the Pacific. ‘I’m delighted to be here, I’m delighted to be anywhere’, he said. Alison had just started an MA in Archaeology. She said she didn’t miss work anymore, but missed seeing children…as a child psychiatrist…‘but not having to contemplate their misery’. Ray, another Ray, had Parkinson’s and a lot of daughters. We heard about the interesting patient with the peritoneal pregnancy, from John. Ross spoke about life now: cycling, going to the gym three times a week, taking out the scour, and doing volunteer work at a Maritime Museum. David, a pathologist now doing Coronial inquests presented three cases, in all of which he argued a major factor in the death, was that there was no one person to take ‘responsibility of care’.

Most friendships are made over the cadavers…a hepatitis outbreak…gardening, embroidery, music…still in coronary care…a BA in Maori Studies…departed for Greymouth…and then what happened?…learning more and more, about less and less…the Lord said to go into psychiatry…the class was typified by commonsense…things can be done…paid for the hospital by taking out a mortgage and then repaid it with the annual grant…evidence of hydrogen sulphide poisoning…have various qualifications in various things…I’ve always been very proud of this class, more proud now…I have 5 children and 14 grandchildren…I had 22 babies on the Chatham Islands…supposed to be a bicultural country, wouldn’t know it from looking around here…the longer I’m in the game the more I become convinced behaviour is based on DNA/genetics…bottom of the heap kids…I’ve had nothing but good luck, it has been a privilege to be a Dr. and do something to help those that have nothing but bad luck…I worry about medicine…the best group that ever went through medical school…vicious cancers…a dedicated GP…still doing surgical locums…have had our ups and down like everyone, whether they admit it or not…orthopaedic registrar…I am going deaf…what did we do then?…what?…is there a microphone?…none of us were promised tomorrow…needed a bit of a shake-up…what is the problem?…How to treat it…

We interred Mum’s ashes in the Ashburton cemetery a couple of weeks later, on a Saturday. She was a nurse.