TONSILLECTOMY
My little grand-daughter had a tonsillectomy last week. She has recovered well. It reminded me of my own experience when I was five. After contracting the dreaded diphtheria when I was three (read about it in my book ‘ Gardening in Your Nineties’), I suffered from frequent bouts of tonsillitis. Our nearest doctor at Beenleigh advised my parents that I should have my enlarged tonsils removed. Times were tough in 1933, and my father asked what the cost would be. ‘Five pounds,’ was the answer. Five pounds! When the average monthly cream cheque was ten shillings in those depression days, this meant ten months work…and what if my sister then had to have her tonsils out? My father did his calculations. ‘Would you consider operating on both of my daughters for the one fee?’ he asked the country doctor who replied, ‘Of course.’ So Joan, who had never had a sore throat, and I were taken to the little cottage hospital and our tonsils were guillotined off. We were ill from the effects of the chloroform, and our throats were bleeding and painful. On the way home in the Chevvie tourer, we sucked chunks of ice knocked from a big block wrapped in a kerosene sack. There was no refrigeration, so the unaccustomed ice would not last long. We recovered, but when I was sixteen it was necessary to have my tonsil remnants removed. Joan never ever had a sore throat!
A CHILD OF THE DEPRESSION
When I say that I am ‘a child of the Depression’, most folk know what I mean. It tells them that I do not waste anything if I can help it; I buy hardly anything if I can do without it; and I get great satisfaction out of tastefully using left-overs that are in my...
TO END… OR NOT TO END…
I cannot quite understand it. Here is this woman, 86 years old, very capable, well educated and articulate, good company and in good health, but who is flying to Switzerland next week to have herself euthanised. No, I don ‘t quite get it. Now, I know she says she has...
ONE THING LEADS TO ANOTHER
One thing always leads to another. One of the many interviews that I have done has lead to a learned fellow coming up to do a podcast about ageing, with me, the nonagenarian, doing the talking! He thought it was very good, and a week or so later I received a request...
MEDICAL ASSISTANCE, NOW AND THEN
What a difference a few decades make! When I was a growing girl in the city, our doctor lived a few streets away. He practiced from home, and would make a lot of house calls; needs must, because in those days just prior to WWII, there would be only one car to a...
MY BREAKFAST COMPANION
If I am engrossed in reading something (perhaps The Bulletin?) he will let me know he is there. Oh yes! He is impatient for me to notice him, for he wants to be fed. Not later, but now. This instant. I know he is not popular with bird lovers. They say he frightens off...
MY TAP DANCING DAYS
The Hollywood Theatre once stood proudly on the corner of Logan and Chatsworth Roads in Greenslopes. Every Saturday morning in 1938 I would take my sixpence (five cents) to attend the tap-dancing class that was held at the back of the stage. I was ten. There was a...
LIVING WITH A DISABILITY
I have a granddaughter who has ataxia, a form of cerebral palsy. She has a weakness in her hands, her tongue muscle and in the muscles of one leg. This means she cannot run, her fingers will not grasp smaller objects and her speech is sometimes hard to understand. She...
TRUE STORY: MUM’S FEET
It was during the Great Depression, when money was in short supply, that the collector would visit weekly to pick up a small amount of cash toward the sum that was owed. The two young boys who were sitting at the top of the outside stairs glimpsed the gas man...
ENAMELLED PLAQUE
During the last war, my parents befriended two American soldiers, brothers from Idaho. We became very fond of them and were devastated when the younger one lost his life in the fierce fighting in New Guinea. I wrote to his mother until she died and vowed to visit the...
REMEMBERING OLD SCHOOL DAYS
How I love reading of the old days in the Tamborine Bulletin! Not only does it inform me; it sometimes takes me back to my childhood at Buccan and my school days at Logan Village. This time, I was transported to the one-teacher school where headmaster Mr Alec Brown...