Starting again….

It is several years since I have been involved in my Heatedstew blog. There have been good reasons for that. It was necessary to sell our farm and purchase and move into a suburb. Not surprisingly I’m getting older and there have been a number of health problems. I think that I am getting back onto more level ground. So here goes again!

A few months ago our house was tingling with excitement, and with very good reason. A young man was arriving from America, He’s very short having had both legs cut off when he was run over by a train. He is not one eyed but one armed, and he’s making a great success of his life! My wife and I had hoped to adopt him but our government refused. He was adopted into America where he lives and goes to University. He was on an American wheelchair rugby paralympic team in 2016 but now majors in wheelchair basketball.

Here he is as a young teenager playing outside his adopting parents home in America (??2009).

There are some excellent Ethiopian surgeons, a rare one is not! Accordinging to the boy when he woke after the accident (he was run over by a train when he was doing something maybe considered necessary to survive but stupid and dangerous) he still had both knees and several fingers. His amputations are just below his hips and his elbow. Length is very important for making prostheses work, but I assume that as a poor countryside kid they were looking to make him a successful beggar. This surgeon was in the ‘bad’ group!

When I met him he was still in hospital after his initial surgery. I was told that he was due for discharge back onto the street where he had been living. I immediately asked permission to take him home with me. His amputations were not well done and on his left stump the bone end had not been smoothed and the spicules of the non-well rounded bone end, not covered with muscle were sticking into the skin and he was in agony with every slight movement. As he was not living with his family – his dad was dead and his mother ill – he had been a street kid and there was trouble getting permission to take him home with me.

He at that stage knew no English. But in my very average knowledge of Amharic we got on ok. ‘Do you have to pee at night?’ I asked as if the answer was ‘yes’ I’d have to get up and carry him. ‘No’ he said. ‘Good’ I thought! ‘Do you wake up with horrible nightmares?’ I asked. His reply absolutely staggered me. ‘There is a God in heaven and I’ve put myself into His hands.’ he said.

The weather was drizzly and as we came near Addis the mud thrown up by other vehicles made it necessary to use the windscreen wipers and washers. He had as far as I know never been in a car before, although he was pretty streetwise. When the water was squirted onto the window he asked me where that came from? I said ‘There are two little boys under the hood and I give them a shock and they pee for me.’ A horrified gasp, followed by a healthy laugh ‘Now tell me the truth.’ I knew then that we would get on!

He had several trips into hospital in Addis to have his amputations made more appropriate. He stayed with my wife in Ethiopia for a year while she taught. I was diagnosed with cancer and had to come back to Australia for surgery. Then I returned to Ethiopia and we three made arrangements for a medical visa for him to come here for prostheses but the Australian Government wouldn’t allow us to adopt him. We still consider him as a ‘son’.

Dominic Cartier (maybe more later)

Cheaper by the dozens!

By the normal, enjoyable, route God graciously gave us five children, then we adopted two more and have been blessed by a couple of dozen either living with us for a while, making our home away from home or with us developing a close relationship with them as we helped them get reasonable educations.

They are such a good looking mob that I would love to be able to show you pictures of them all, but that apparently is not a good idea. I will just number them and tell a story about a few.

The first was delivered by Caesarian Section, an operation requested by us. At a prenatal check up his heart was playing up pretty grossly and we were advised that he would almost certainly be mentally abnormal and that we should just allow the pregnancy to go to term (which was soon) and see what developed. We did not accept that. Truly he had an irregular heart for a while but that soon settled. If he is mentally defective, I’m glad, for otherwise he would be so far ahead of me that I would be surpassed by an absolute genius.
His mother wanted a certain name for him. A name which I didn’t like, so as I was learning by then how to occasionally win an argument , I said nothing but just put my choice in the paper, as we did in those days, with my choice listed. We had agreed on his first name. He has been director of a Bible School in the Sudan, lecturer at a Bible College and director of a mission school in Ethiopia and is now a pastor of a moderate sized church. I’m not sure but I think that he has four degrees.
He was probably one of the two most difficult of our natural kids as a teenager, but has grown into a man’s man and is great. Trained in science, education and theology, and having been a maths teacher for years, he now is training to be a worker amongst disadvantaged men. He and his lovely wife have plans to extend their ministry even wider in the future.
Our fourth child was born in the midst of a cholera epidemic. Heavily jaundiced we think that he developed a mild case of cholera. He is also well educated with several degrees and is a Maths teacher. Proud of him for many reasons, I am tickled pink because he turned down a promotion so that he could still keep contact with kids as he was trained to do. He was given a title as a young teacher of ‘magpie poop’. He had a patch of white on the back of his hair where he had suffered an injury and his hair regrew white.
Our only daughter is the spitting image of her mother and thus very beautiful. Having trained as a preschool teacher she is now personal assistant to the head of the secondary division of a moderately large Christian School. She is a great violinist (her teacher once said that she was Symphony Orchestra material) and a beautiful singer. Which, given her parents singing ability hints at a mutated gene.
A double orphan, starved, protein wise, as a child, came to us as a teenager. Given his background, he has achieved as much as any of his older siblings and is qualified in geriatric care and has the drive to be setting himself up to provide services for the disabled. Personality wise he is a delight.
As a child born out of time he became ours legally when we were seventy-ish. Again a near teenager when we ‘got’ him, he has turned out a gem. I guess, like all of us, time will tell but he is a keen and competent apprentice, good at IT. While we were still in Ethiopia he made money by fixing up many others computers and phones. He is very helpful for his IT backward parents!

Older than our oldest child, the first young man we brought to Australia to study has become head of a significant and quite large government organization in Australia. Offered the post of head of a diplomatic post in Africa, he rejected it for various reasons. He has a beautiful family and his oldest son was the first to give us a child who acknowledges us as great-grandparents.

We have been able to help over 20 young people through their education. A few have disappointed us, most of them have made us very proud. CEO’s, presidents of organizations, teachers, and although not helped by us financially a number with whom I’ve been involved in their training are top-notch doctors. I get the greatest joy from them when they write or message and thank me for my work ethic and even more when they talk about our role in their developing Christian faith. Thus several of them are now professors and heads of strategic medical units.

Maybe not financially, but cheaper by the dozen, and we luv ’em all.

Dominic Cartier.

Children….

I’m writing this because I read yesterday of the 150 children kidnapped from a school in Nigeria. This is one of many such attacks with about 1,000 children in all being taken since December last year. Some, a minority, have been released. That is mind-boggling and I’m surprised that that it doesn’t provoke international ire and offered help to the Nigerian Government for help. Such help may of course have been offered and rejected. Some of the pictures I have seen from before indicate that some taken were Muslims. The latest school attacked was the Bethel Baptist School.

In Australia as doctors we have to be very careful. It is difficult for medical students to get into watch a child being examined without parental or guardian permission. As a doctor I am not allowed into an operating room without special registration with each individual hospital, even with adults being operated on. This is a long way away from the old system where operating rooms had mezzanine floors built so that many students and other doctors could watch and learn.

It reminded me of a medical student from Australia visiting us in Ethiopia for an elective term, who told me that I dare not treat children with the affection that I did there, if I was in Australia.

This boy had been run over by a cotton picking machine and had massive injuries from his pelvis down. It took my hat on his head to get a smile out of him. It was a weak smile but took weeks to achieve!

Months later when we got him standing with help, I got a real smile! He had about 20 operations.

Sometimes it took my glasses to get any attention

You can see that this poor kid has lost an arm. We had at least one case a week of cases like this. This occurred rarely because of an accident but ususlly because with a fracture (I guess we could call that an accident!) but that had been badly managed by a local healer who bound the limb, leg or arm so tightly that it caused gangrene.

This young guy had been kept at home until his leg dropped off. You can see how flexed his hip is. He was so weak that we had train him to stand up again, initially by holding him. We did make wooden legs initially and later there were prosthetic limbs available.

This is one such limb made in Arba Minch for a teenager who was so ill when he came in with a gangrenous leg and septic shock that even after initial resuscitation he had 2 cardiac arrests on the operating table. He did well and the last I saw him was attending school supported by an Australia who visited us and met him. There is a lot more to the story than I have told here, as you can guess!

You can see the scar on this boy’s head. He was in ICU and with a very low GCS (a count of severity of head injury) and the nursing staff wanted to put him in the ward as they were sure that he would die. I resisted and although he had a few problems (he was nearly blind), he survived and he loved me and would come running to me whenever he heard my steps. Should I have held him and tickled him? His dad was so happy that he lived!

I may show a copy of some gross pictures of suffering in my medical memoirs blog but here sufficient to say that I treated a thousand or more kids and they all needed medical, emotional and often physical loving. My heart bleeds for those taken in Nigeria and their families, but this is a worldwide problem. Let’s give all the help we can!

Dominic Cartier.