Around the table!

It seems like centuries ago but I can still remember the seven of us sitting around the table and chatting, discussing, arguing – whatever took our fancy. The boys were all into soccer, I played cricket and even one year I coached the U15 soccer team when our oldest boy was in the team. My son persuaded me to do so as they didn’t have a coach. They had lost the first two matches and as he said were ‘unorganized’. Several kids didn’t like my disciplined approach and left, but we didn’t lose a match and won the grand final 8-1. One of the boys ended up in the Australian team! But I’ve become sidetracked so back to the main story. At our table we talked about many medical things which might have made some visitors squirmish. I had returned from Ethiopia because of health, and could not return at that time because of the Communist take over. However, we had lived in the hospital grounds. There was a large leprosarium so the kids grew up seeing the deformities caused by that disease. Our first son was a bad sleeper so that with my wife’s third and fourth pregnancies he would come into the theatre, if I was operating in the evening (pretty often) so that mum and number two and eventually number three child could get a decent sleep. Aged four he learnt how to squeeze the anaesthetic bag if patients were paralysed. I had to give my own anaesthetics and a worker would manage the anaesthetic when the patient was asleep. They enjoyed teaching the little white kid how to do certain tasks. The kids used to do Sunday rounds with me in the hospital after church. So they knew the sights and screams and smells of medicine!

I remember one day, when my wife was away looking after a sick parent, the kids asking me at the breakfast table what I was operating on that day. They knew the ending ‘ectomy’ but when I said an ‘oesophagectomy’ one of the younger boys asked ‘what is an oesophagus?’ It’s what joins your mouth to your stomach’, I replied. ‘So how does the food get down then?’ was the next question. ‘I pull the stomach up and sew it to the end of the throat’ I replied. It is a bit more difficult than that and takes a few hours but I didn’t go into detail. Number four’s answer has always tickled my fancy. ‘Now there is a man who can truly say “I’m full up to here!”‘ indicating his Adam’s apple area (at 5 his Adam’s apple wasn’t developed – but you know what I mean.

Dominic Cartier