The Complete Book of Australian Flying Doctor Stories (46 page)

I worked as a doctor for the Royal Flying Doctor Service for fifteen years and, while it was a very rich and rewarding experience, oh, we had some very harrowing things to deal with. Because unfortunately not all our retrievals lead to happy endings. But if you’ve got a job to do, you just do it and that’s all there is about it. That’s the doctor’s edict, isn’t it? But in my experience, extremely severe burns cases are probably the hardest ones to deal with, because if the veins have been burnt then you can’t get the cannula in, to give them fluids — and they need lots of fluids — plus, of course, there’s the intravenous analgesics to relieve the pain.

For example, I got a call once on the HF radio that a feller had gone out on his motor bike to burn off windrows of scrub on his station property. He was by himself and he had some sort of fire lighting machine, or flame thrower, tied around his neck, which ran on a combination of diesel and petrol. So he was lighting the windrows of scrub with this machine and whether he had the wrong fuel combination in it or what I don’t know, but, anyway it exploded while it was still attached to his neck and he received full thickness burns and partial thickness burns to over 50 per cent of his entire body surface area.

As I said, this feller was by himself. What’s more, he had no means of communication with his home base. So he rolled on the ground to put the flames
out then, with these extensive burns to his body, he got on his motor bike and he rode 18 kilometres back to his home, opening and closing three gates along the way. And that was an amazing act. Because you know how in the bush it’s continually drummed into us to ‘always leave the gates as you find them?’ Of course, you wouldn’t expect someone to follow that rule when they have 50 per cent body surface area burns, would you? But he did. This feller, he did it to a tee. He opened and closed three gates along the 18-kilometre journey back to get help. So it’s really ingrained in people, isn’t it — ‘always leave gates as you find them.’

Anyway, he finally arrived at the homestead and that’s when we got the call. So the pilot flew the nurse and I out there where, first of all, we resuscitated him. Then we prepared him for transport by putting in an indwelling catheter to catch his urine. We then loaded him in the plane and headed off to the Royal Brisbane Hospital. And this feller was in such a bad way that on the flight down to Brisbane his urine was just solid myoglobinuria, from the muscle which had been burnt. So you could say that he was sort of urinating melted muscle.

But he died, the poor feller, four or five days later on, in the Burns Unit at the Royal Brisbane Hospital. But, once again, as distressing as it was, that was a story of just sheer courage in my books. ‘Always leave gates as you find them.’

Another extremely distressing event was when we got a call that two fellers had been burnt in an explosion at an oil rig, out on the South Australian border. The most serious of the two had received burns
to over 90 per cent of his body surface area. He was still alive but he’d inhaled the flames, which meant that he’d burnt his lungs as well.

Now, the second feller, the one with the least burns, he pulled through eventually so I’ll concentrate on the problems we had with the most seriously burnt feller. When we got out there, firstly I had to try and find a vein where there were no burns. With having burns to over 90 per cent of his body, that was difficult. In the end, the only place I could cannulate him was down at his ankle. I then put him to sleep — paralysed him — then I had to put an intratracheal tube into his trachea so that I could ventilate him. This also caused problems as his vocal cords had also been partially burnt and I had to split them before I could get the intratracheal tube into him. I was then faced with a greater problem; perhaps a more ethical one. I had a pretty fair idea that this feller was going to die. But, if at all possible, I wanted him to remain alive at least until his relatives could see him before he did die. And as our destination was the Royal Brisbane Hospital, that meant we’d have to keep him going for a fair number of hours. So we loaded the two fellers into the aeroplane and we called up another RFDS plane and we organised to meet halfway, at Charleville.

At Charleville we performed an escharotomy on the most serious of the two fellers, which entailed the cutting of burnt tissue. See, skin tissue, when it burns, contracts and causes a blockage of the blood flow, which doesn’t allow the chest to expand for respiration purposes. So we did an escharotomy on him at Charleville and then we put him in the other plane and they took him down to Brisbane.

And that was that. His family did get to see him while he was still alive. Whether they wanted to or not, I don’t know, because he was just a black, black charred mess. But it was very horrible from my point of view having to do these things, and it was also an extremely exhausting and emotional time, because the poor feller of course died, as I figured he would.

By the late 1970s, early ’80s, we’d well and truly established our station property, which was about 350 kilometres out from Kalgoorlie, in Western Australia. I was managing the place by this stage and one year we had a team of shearers from New Zealand come through, a large number of whom were Maoris. Anyhow, one morning one of the Maori chaps was shearing away and his handpiece jammed and it flew around and cut him severely on the forearm. With blood gushing everywhere, the first thing his mates did was to grab a towel and wrap it around his arm in an attempt to stem the flow. But this was only a temporary measure because it was obvious that urgent medical help was required.

At the time of the accident, I was working out in the sheep yards and the first thing that I knew about it was when one of the shearers came rushing out from the shed. ‘There’s been a serious accident,’ he called. ‘Is there any way we can get in touch with a doctor, and fast?’

Now, I’ll just remind you that we were 350 kilometres or so from the nearest hospital. But, as luck would have it, I had the portable radio in the car. So I got straight onto the Flying Doctor base in Kalgoorlie and told them about the problem and how the shearer was in dire need of help.

‘Well actually,’ the person at the base said, ‘at this moment there’s a plane on its way back to Kalgoorlie
from a clinic run out along the Eyre Highway and Trans-line. We’ll divert them. And don’t worry,’ the person added, ‘they should be there in a few minutes.’

So I raced the 4 kilometres or so down to the homestead then I drove on down to the airstrip. The plane arrived not long after and I rushed the doctor back up to the wool shed, where he got straight in and treated the injured shearer.

Now, in this particular case the doctor had arrived on the scene of the accident within an hour. So you can imagine what this team of New Zealand shearers was thinking. They couldn’t believe it. Here was one of their mates, having been severely injured, right out on the Nullarbor, which is out in the middle of nowhere, hundreds of kilometres from the nearest town, and help arrived so quickly. Within the hour. To them, it was almost unbelievable, and of course, it brought home the huge importance of the Royal Flying Doctor Service, not only for the shearers themselves but they also realised just how important the RFDS is to everyone living out in these remote areas.

And so appreciative of the service were these New Zealand shearers that, at the end of the shearing, they decided to donate an hour’s time in aid of the RFDS. That is, each of the shearers gave one hour’s shearing time, the shed hands gave one hour’s wages; everyone did, right through to the contractor himself. And for what was an eight-stand team, this ended up making quite a sizable cheque. Then, when the next-door neighbour heard about this, he also cottoned on to the idea. Better still, he had a bigger flock and a bigger shed and of course a bigger team, which in turn translated into an even bigger cheque.

In the end, this giving of time became an annual fundraising event throughout the area. As a follow-on from that, all the shearing contractors in Western Australia ended up establishing a state-wide appeal, with the shearers and such donating an hour of their working time and with all the proceeds going to the RFDS.

I first started with the RFDS as a flight nurse up in Port Augusta, South Australia, then I went down to Adelaide for a while and now this is my third year up in the Northern Territory, working out of Alice Springs. Initially, I used to get terribly airsick. Oh, for the first three weeks I remember I was as sick as a dog. Then one day I just suddenly got over it, thank goodness, and now I don’t have a problem with airsickness, not even when we’re going through the roughest of conditions.

Actually, I remember when the turn-about took place. We were flying a young guy back after he’d somehow been blown out of a cherry-picker and had broken just about every bone in his body. This was before we had pressurised aircraft so we had to fly at around the 2000-feet level. I knew it was going to be rough so as we were about to take off my first thought was, ‘Here we go again. I’m going to be airsick.’

Anyhow, we took off and as we were flying along, getting bounced around, the doctor wasn’t offering a great deal of help and so all of my focus was on this seriously injured patient. Then when I turned around to ask the doctor if he might lend me a hand, there he was with his head stuck in a sick bag, really going for it. Great help, aye. And at that exact moment it struck me: ‘Hey, I don’t get airsick any more.’ And I haven’t been airsick since.

But some people just really struggle to adjust to working inside an aircraft while it’s in flight. Another
time, I remember, we had a paediatrician out with us — he was only a new chap — and we flew from Port Augusta, out to Cooper Pedy, on to Yalata, then back to Port Augusta, and he threw up all the way. Mind you, at the time I was pretty annoyed with him. But then after a while you look back on those sort of things as humorous events, don’t you?

One that wasn’t so funny was when I first came up here to Alice Springs and we flew out to a community in the Pitjantjatjara Lands for a guy who’d had a heart attack. By the time we arrived it was dark and, so that we could land, the pilot had to activate the lighting on the strip. Then when we walked into the emergency room, this crook bloke, he was very, very sick indeed. Actually, he was grey. After doing ECGs, we decided that we had to give him a couple of doses of a certain medication that helps dissolve the clots in the heart.

Then, just as we were giving him the first dose, a huge thunderstorm hit. Absolutely huge it was, and the lightning struck the power supply and all the lights went out in the community. So we didn’t have any lights. Anyhow, the second dose of the medication had to be given thirty minutes after the first dose, that’s providing no abnormalities develop in the patient’s heart reading. At that stage we were monitoring him with a torch, on the life pack, in an attempt to gauge whether to give him this second dose or not.

In the meantime our pilot’s out at the generator, with the essential services officer, trying to see if they can fix the power because the doctor was keen to fax off copies of the ECG to the specialist in Alice Springs. And of course without power, the fax machine wasn’t working. The phones weren’t working either and we
also needed power to light the airstrip so that we could take off. So we waited for half an hour and in the end we just decided to go ahead and give the second dose by torchlight. Then, just as we were doing that, the ambulance drove up and its lights shone straight into the emergency room and we discovered, ‘Oh, we’ve now got light.’ So we did the rest by the headlights of the ambulance, and everything went beautifully.

Anyhow, we finished the treatment and we gave the patient pain relief. Finally they got the power back on and the lights sorted out so we prepared the patient and we headed out to the airstrip. Then just as we started getting ready to load the stretcher, the heavens opened again and it just bucketed down. Absolutely bucketed down. There was water everywhere. The only person that was dry was the patient because we’d put a plastic sheet over him.

Of course, now the pilot’s on edge because a heavy downpour on a dirt strip can make for an extremely difficult take-off. What’s more, the plane was a Pilatus PC 12, which is worth something like $5 or $6 million, all decked out. They’re like a flying hospital. Basically, they’ve got everything you’d need in an ICU (Intensive Care Unit). So they’re very expensive things, which was why the pilot was so on edge. The last thing he’d want to do was to drop the thing or bog it or damage it in any way.

Anyhow, there we were, soaked to the bone and freezing cold. Still, we managed to get the patient into the plane and after a careful assessment we took off. But because of the thunderstorm, it was an extremely rough flight and by now I’m going through the possibilities of ‘What else could go wrong?’ So I made
the patient as comfortable as I could and made doubly sure that everything was nice and tight and secure.

‘Good,’ I said to myself, ‘now I can relax a bit.’

No sooner had I said that than the patient started vomiting. And that was the final straw because now there were bits of camp pie being sprayed all over the place. Anyway, we eventually landed back in Alice Springs. The storm was over by then and the next day they flew the patient down to Adelaide, where he had bypass surgery. So it all worked out well for him. But we were left to clean his mess out of the plane and then, of course, my uniform also had chuck all through it. It was just shocking. There was camp pie everywhere.

Because my name’s Norton Gill, everyone out at the base knows me as ‘Capt Norty’. So you could say that my wife has a ‘Norty’ in bed with her every night. I’ve been a pilot with the RFDS for twenty-four years or so now. And, yes, I still enjoy it. When I get that call at two o’clock in the morning or whenever, I still get out of bed and I just go out there and I do it. But I’m going on sixty years old and I’ve only got a year and a bit to go before I retire. And when that happens, my wife, Margaret, and I, we’ll join the grey nomads and drive around Australia.

But oh, sometimes these aeroplanes can play tricks and, you know, when they do they can really put the wind up you. I can remember going from Cairns over to the Gulf of Carpentaria one time to visit the Kowanyama Aboriginal Community. I was flying a King Air that had just come out of maintenance. Anyhow, it was coming on dark so the sun was just going down. I had the doctor sitting up front with me — a bloke called Gary — when all of a sudden an alarm came on to say that we had a fire in the left-hand side motor or, in flying terms, the port motor.

‘What’s that?’ Gary called out.

‘It’s the fire alarm,’ I said.

Well, he mustn’t have comprehended that straight away because he said, ‘What, have we got a fire?’

So I had a bit of a look out of my side window and I said, ‘No, I don’t think so. I can’t see anything.’

And that’s what you do. If you get a fire warning in these aeroplanes, the first thing you do is have a look and see if there’s any smoke coming out anywhere. Then if there is, the first thing you do is close down the motor. It’s not really such a big drama. I mean, you’ve got systems in place. There’s fire extinguishers on board and all that to put a fire out. But I’ve never heard of one ever catching fire.

But the thing that did concern me was that if this King Air had just come out of maintenance, well, it does make you wonder, doesn’t it? Anyhow, we continued flying along with Gary, the doctor, breaking out into a sweat while he’s sniffing here and there, just in case he can detect smoke. Then, would you believe it, a couple of seconds later the right-hand, or starboard, motor fire alarm comes on. So then we had two fire alarms going. And if poor old Gary wasn’t pretty twitchy beforehand, he certainly was now.

‘Is there another fire?’ he asked.

‘Well,’ I said, ‘look out your side window. Can you see any smoke?’

So he craned his neck as far as it could go. ‘No, I don’t think so,’ he said.

‘Well,’ I said, ‘just you watch this,’ and I turned the aircraft about 45° and, when I did, both the fire alarms went out, just like that. So then he started to relax…just a tiny bit.

But see, what happened in those older model King Airs was that if the sun was at just the right angle it shone, or reflected, through a small gap somewhere and it used to hit these little sensor things inside the motor. That’s when you’d get the fire alarm coming on. I mean, you didn’t even need sunlight. The same thing
used to happen back when I was doing night freight and sometimes you’d start up under normal electric light and a fire alarm would come on. Then, very occasionally, they’d even come on in the rain.

Anyhow, it was quite an interesting thing to have both alarms come on. That was extremely unusual. But it wasn’t fire. And in those King Airs they had a turbine motor — the Pratt and Whitney PT6s — and really I’ve never heard of any of them ever catching fire. It was just that they had these old fire sensors in them, that’s all. So yes, poor old Gary, he got quite twitchy about it all. It really put the wind up him. Mind you, I must admit it initially put the wind up me too, especially when both the port and starboard fire alarms came on.