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.

TO my Grandkids….

I don’t know where I found it, but looking through old photos I came across this. For some reason it obviously impressed me.

I can’t imagine that it was when my first grandson was born about 30 years ago. And I have ten of them at any rate. I love my six grand daughters as much so it maybe should be titled ‘GRANDCHILDREN’. and I have 2 7/9 great grandchildren so I’ll include them in my thinking.

I got to think about it line by line today in the light of my eighty plus years of life experience. I’ve alredy added to the first but let me go on.

A nice thought but honestly I don’t believe it. Surely I believe that even if suffering from some physical, emotional or mental problem then you can still achieve a huge amount. If it ever occurred can you cure yourself of a stage four cancer when it is discovered late, I doubt it, maybe modern medicine or God may do so . If someone’s IQ is about 100 do I believe that, just by wishing it, they can become a professor of astrophysics. I doubt it, even if they are some type of appropriate idiot savant. Nevertheless they will be capable of a lot if they really put their mind to it. And I seek to remind you that a thorough cleaner is as important to a successful operation as a good surgeon. And if the anaesthetist makes a big mistake maybe the patient will die. I had a friend visit me in Ethiopia who queried how many geniuses there were laying on the grass watching a few cattle. It would be hard to imagine how they would travel to the moon!

Well I must say that you can lose. You should learn from failures surely, and it is much better to do so than to wallow in your losses. But you can lose – a marriage partner may die young or a child be taken by disease or an accident. That will be a shattering loss. Or maybe you will lose a parent early. Even at my old age if/ when my wife dies, if she dies before me, it will be a shattering loss.

Obviously this is a metaphor stressing the need to aim whole heartedly at what you want. A phase with lots of positivity about it. But I don’t want you to aim at being a successful con man or bank robber or abortionist. But there is a wide range of things with which if you desire I offer you my very best wishes. And it does say aim at the skies, I certainly would encourage you to think hard about sky (eternal) issues.

The loving under all circumstances may prove hard at time, but promising to love you is sincere. True love doesn’t stop you from being upset or even speaking your mind, but love can persist through those things. I hope that I could even love you if you declare that you hate me. Certainly I hope to die before you do, but I can’t even promise you that.

Which makes me wonder how much time do I have left here on earth to love you. And to wonder may it be possible for me to love you from the ‘skies’? I have a certain HOPE that it will be a possibility.

Dominic Cartier, your grandfather.

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.

Family life on the farm.

We live on a small farm. My doctor claims that I should move to a suitable place in a city or town and spend my time socializing. Neither my wife nor i like the idea much. Remaining here does depend on having help and we are very thankful that two of our sons still live with us. One, sadly divorced, is our main stay as a carer and runs the farm; one adopted, young, unmarried is a mechanic’s apprentice.

They live downstairs, having enough to be independent but we still have a close relationship as a foursome. My wife and I live upstairs with a sliding elevator for me. My wife still loves gardening (more than house work!) and does the shopping and visits other folk.

I thought that I would show you some of things which make life here interesting!

Our youngest son repairing the diesel injection fuel pump on the old larger tractor. He did a good job!

Our older son is also extremely capable. The bucket on our smaller tractor with years of use was tearing in several places. So with several pieces of steel welded in it is ‘new’ again – at a fraction of the cost of a new one. The plates with holes in them welded onto the bottom are to allow us to attach two forks and use it as a forklift! That works well and is very useful!

We had nine lambs from twelve ewes and as you can see here they are getting almost ready for the butcher. I must confess I am a carnivore but hate killing most things. My hate doesn’t extend to mosquitoes, cockroaches or mice but to kill a lamb is beyond me. Sadly one of our lambs developed paralysis of its back legs, so we now only have eight. We will add the females to the flock (which with recently added numbers from some collected in Aramac is now 27 ewes; the wethers will be butchered and go into the fridge. We should get enough meat for some months at less than half the price if we had to buy it in a supermarket or butcher.

I had a phone call from America last night. This book is already published as an e-book. They want to bring it out as a printed edition. That will mean a lot more work converting it from an e-book production to a word document. They will then edit it and spread the news. Much of the work this end will fall on our son who besides everything else is extremely good with IT. I guess the cover gives away my pseudonym but if you want to buy the e-book look up

http://www.smashwords.com have scalpel will travel or Barry Hicks AM FRACS on your service engine and it will tell you how to get it! Another medical diagnostic book and some other blogs are also mentioned under my name.

So life goes on, not with for me the pace of yesteryear, but still fascinating. I thank God for the measure of health He has given us.

Dominic Cartier

A Day Out.

My orthopaedic surgeon allows me to take, once every few months, a high dose three day course of prednisolone to allow me to have a pretty pain free couple of days. I use his permission for special events. I used it this week.

In retirement my wife and I live with two of our sons on a small 100 acre (40Hac) property. About 40% of it is taken up with 2 hills steep and covered with my enemy the Chonkee Apple. That leaves us about 60 useful acres. One of my sons is adopted and younger than many of our grandchildren. He is an apprentice mechanic. The other much older has a part time job as pastor of a small church, and makes caring for us and the farm the rest of his job.

So what do we do on the 60 acres? We are developing, I guess you would call it a hobby farm, with Dorper sheep. Initially we bought 12 ewes and a ram. We got 11 lambs, sadly one of which was stillborn and the dogs got at two of them. The dogs have since gone to dogs’ heaven even though we loved them very much. A farmer cannot tolerate that behaviour, and I refused to see them chained up all the time.

So we have 8 lambs nearly ready for market (males) or putting back into the breeding flock (females).

Here the lambs are separated in a small paddock to finish fattening them.

As we separated them from the small flock we counted 8 of them. I think if you try you can count 8 heads. The brown in their ears makes counting a bit difficult. But there were 8. Yesterday there were 9!

All our ewes have ear tags. None of these have. The 2 uncastrated ram lambs are easily identified and there are still only 2. So How? I don’t have an answer except maybe our neighbour who has a few now has one less. Something about grass on the other side of the fence being greener! At any rate they are looking in good nic.

But what has that got to do with my use of prednisolone? Nothing! We decided to buy some more ewes. Hopefully by getting a good percentage of ewe lambs we hope to run a breeding stock of about 50. The only place we have been able to get them is a round trip of about 1,200Km. This area around us is a cattle area, so there aren’t many sheep, and not many have dorper sheep. (These don’t need shearing, they shed their wool.) So I, usually limited to small trips and often in a wheelchair these days, wanted to go with my son. Hence the three day course.

This son, whom I think is extraordinarily capable, has built two crates to fit a ute and a trailer plus a ramp

So setting out at about 10 in the morning, we arrived back and by midnight had unloaded the extra 15 ewes and were in bed by midnight. I thoroughly enjoyed the outing.

Sunset on the way home over the long Western Queensland plains. It has been a good season.

The new sheep waiting in the yard the next morning. They are a pretty colourful group.

Now we’ll have to wait and see how many lambs we get. They’re all supposed to be pregnant.

Dominic Cartier.