A Nurse on the Edge of the Desert: From Birdsville to Kandahar: The art of extreme nursing

by Andrew Cameron

Overview

International humanitarian-aid nurse and New Zealander Andrew Cameron is the winner of the coveted Florence Nightingale Medal. In this gripping book he recounts his remarkable life nursing in some of the world's most dangerous and challenging locations, including South Sudan, Yemen, Sierra Leone and Afghanistan. He also details his nursing career in some of Australia's most remote settlements, where anything can be waiting at the end of a long and dusty outback road: a major road accident, a suicide, a broken arm, a stabbing. With mordant humour, wisdom and insight, he recounts the challenges, excitements, and huge rewards of a nursing life.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780994141507
Publisher:	Massey University Press
Publication date:	08/01/2017
Series:	A Nurse on the Edge of the Desert
Sold by:	INDEPENDENT PUB GROUP - EPUB - EBKS
Format:	eBook
Pages:	304
File size:	6 MB

About the Author

Andrew Cameron grew up in the Hawke's Bay, New Zealand, and came to nursing after several years working at a range of jobs. When not working in a war-zone or post-conflict zone, he is the sole medical practitioner in Birdsville, Australia, on the edge of the Simpson Desert and home of the famous Birdsville Races. He is also the recipient of many awards: The Florence Nightingale Medal, Western Australia Nurse of the Year, Australian Nurse of the Year, the Order of Australia (for services to the nursing profession), Massey University's Distinguished Alumni Medal, La Trobe University's Distinguished Alumni Award, and Queensland University's Vice-Chancellor's Alumni Excellence Award.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

4 CHURCH ROAD

I walk, as I walk every evening when I am able, east out of town. A concrete footpath — another new civic amenity — runs most of the way. A steady stream of vehicles is arriving, paintwork blurred by dust, crescents smeared on their windscreens by their wipers. Word has it the Birdsville Track has closed: there will be a lot of disappointed racegoers in South Australia.

As I cross the bridge over the Diamantina, I see that the water level has risen. The sky above us is still blue, but the weather forecast earlier in the day showed a large aquamarine blob spreading over the map of Australia from the west, reaching to the north and then slumping down through the centre.

People are camped everywhere. You have to admire some of the set-ups: people have brought everything, and the kitchen sink. Solar panels gleam in the sunshine, generators hum, and the blue flicker of televisions is visible in many of the RVs and even some of the tents.

Other walkers nod as they pass. Most wear t-shirts, shorts and thongs and the obligatory Akubra hat. Many carry switches of leaves torn from roadside trees to flick away the flies.

Just beyond the sign pointing to the Burke and Wills tree — one of several coolibahs in the Diamantina Shire that bear messages carved in blazes in their bark, indicating to those fabled, ill-fated explorers that supplies were buried beneath — I reach the little cairn I have placed at the roadside to indicate the 2.5-kilometre mark. This is where I turn and head back towards the clinic.

The sun is setting beyond Birdsville. Red sky at night, shepherds' delight — but we know better.

* * *

I was born in Whangarei in 1956, the fifth of the six children to whom my mother Margaret gave birth in just five years. My oldest brother, Nicholas Evan, was born in 1953 in Kerikeri. John David came along on Saint Patrick's Day in 1954, in Okaihau. Mum then had twins, Paul Kenneth and Jocelyn Adrienne in 1955, in Kerikeri, and 18 months after me, Fiona Rosemary was born in Kaikohe in 1959.

With six kids under five, my mother naturally decided that she needed some support, and when we were all still preschoolers, she prevailed upon Sidney, my Dad, to move us south to Hawke's Bay to be near Mum's elderly mother. Mum had enough money left to her from her father's estate to buy a rambling 100-year-old wooden house at 4 Church Road, Taradale. I seem to recall her telling me the house cost £3,000 (around $150,000 in today's money). It was there that I grew up.

The property had many out-buildings, including a woodshed, dairy (with a still-functional milk separator), a cow shed under a big walnut tree, a tool shed, a wash-house and a garage. The toilet and bathroom facilities were far from ideal. We had just one toilet between eight of us, and that was in a tiny room where the only indoor washbasin and bath were also situated. There was no shower. We each had a bath every few days, with three or four sharing the same bath water, one after another. There was only enough hot water for two bathsful, and as youngest boy (I think that was the reason), I was always last in line. Some of my earliest and not necessarily fondest memories are of sitting in the murky, warm water with Dad brushing his teeth a few inches away on one side and a big brother (or worse, sister) letting loose a bowel motion a foot away on the other.

We also had a large garden, where my father grew all kinds of fruits and vegetables. Most households in the street had a vegetable garden in those days, with a compost bin — the norm then, but regrettably a rarity now. We had trees bearing peaches, apricots, grapefruits, lemons and oranges, and a walnut tree. Towards the end of summer, Mum would make countless bottles of preserved fruits and boil up huge saucepans of fruit and sugar to make jam. She peeled the fruit by immersing it in sinks of caustic soda. God knows what that did to our insides. Sometimes, as a family we would go on berry-picking expeditions. We'd come home sunburnt, riddled with prickles and nursing stomach-aches from overeating, but the blackberry and apple pies, which Mum made with thick, crusty butter pastry, were well worth it.

Every autumn a truckload of pre-cut pine would be dumped on our lawn. It was quick work for the six of us to cart it by barrow and stack it in place. By the time we had been at primary school for two or three years, we were adept at stacking firewood, and Mum used to volunteer our services to the old ladies in the neighbourhood when their firewood was delivered. We thought nothing of performing this service, and asked nothing in return.

Similarly, we were often loaned out to our next-door neighbours, the Youngs, a family of Chinese market gardeners. We could see their glasshouse, usually full of tomatoes and other plants, from the rear of our house. Their garden extended for quite some acres, maybe five or six, behind our house down to the creek; it is all built-over with expensive houses now. They were a large family, too: six girls and one boy (Allan), yet sometimes when frost threatened there simply weren't enough Youngs. On these occasions, Mr Wing Young would call around at dinner time and ask Mum if he could urgently borrow us to help put paper covers over each precious, newly emerged seedling.

As we grew older, we would sometimes earn some money from Mr Young, weeding his rows of lettuces and thinning his carrots along seemingly endless rows. We used to get a few pennies for each row.

* * *

My first memories of life in Taradale were of being dropped off at Taradale Primary School, which was next door to us on the other side from the Youngs. On her way to work, my mother would often leave me at the school dental clinic to be minded by the dental nurse, who was a friend of hers. To this day, whenever I smell cloves, I'm transported back to that time, playing with pieces of cotton wool and dental floss on the highly polished blue linoleum floor of that clinic. My later memories of the school dental clinic, or 'murderhouse' as it was known among my generation of school children, are less pleasant. We didn't have toothpaste. Instead, we used a kind of salty, astringent pink powder that came in a small pottle, into which we dipped our toothbrushes. Who knows whether it was the powder that did the damage or the brushes, with bristles like wire, but our teeth and gums suffered. The dental nurse had a field day with her low-speed drill, boring into our teeth and filling them with black amalgam of mercury.

Next to starting school at five, the biggest change in my life came when I turned six and learned to ride a bike. Suddenly, I had more freedom to roam about. My brothers and I went for long rides, often up over the hill to Puketapu, where we'd jump off the high rocks into the Tutaekuri River for a swim — always a delight on hot summer days. When I think of the dangers we took jumping from high cliffs into not-so-clear, fast-running river water, it's a wonder no one injured themselves permanently.

With the extra freedom came added responsibility. A couple of times a month, Mum would send me up to the shops on my bike to pay the bills. As she handed me the wad of dockets, with Bank of New Zealand cheques pinned to each bill, she would say: 'Now, Andrew. This one you must take to the Borough Council and hand it over to the clerk, and make sure you get a receipt. This one, take to the baker and make sure you get a receipt. This one, take to the grocer ... This one to the butcher ...' If I had to collect something to bring home, I had to make sure it was correct otherwise I'd have to go back.

Once I collected a forequarter of lamb from the butcher, as instructed, and brought it home on my handlebars. Upon unwrapping it Mum frowned and said, 'Andrew, you can take this meat back to the butcher. Tell him, nicely, mind you, to cut all that fat off there ... you see? And then tell him Mrs Cameron wants you to re-weigh it and adjust the account.' So that's what I did, and so far as I knew then, there was nothing out of the ordinary about it.

I don't recall getting pocket money from my parents the way most other children got from theirs. Instead we had to earn our own, one way or another. For this I sometimes used to grow beans and carrots and other vegetables and sell them to the neighbours. When I was six, and old enough to push a manual lawnmower, I started to mow the grass for several of the old widows and spinsters who lived in our street and nearby — I had five elderly clients at one time. One was a Miss Alexander who lived in a big house on the corner of Church Road and Puketapu Road.

Then there was Miss Wallace and Mrs Prince, who lived opposite us. I think they were alcoholics and they both had gravely voices from continual cigarette smoking. They had an unusual house and played cards a lot, usually bridge. I can still hear the deep, piratical voice of Miss Wallace asking me if I wanted a glass of lemonade and a piece of cake as I paused for a breather between cutting their front and back lawns. Once they gave me a slice of caraway seed cake and I later said to Mum that 'it wasn't a good cake today. In fact, I could hardly swallow it.' When I'd saved enough shillings, I bought my own shiny new bicycle, blue with whitewall tyres. I spent as much time cleaning and oiling it as I did riding it.

As a family, we must have munched our way through huge amounts of food. At the end of each meal, there was never anything left on our plates, not even a lick of gravy or a crumb of bread. To this day, I'm horrified to see the amount of food people scrape from their dinner plates into the rubbish bin or needlessly throw away. If there was ever any mould or fungus on the food in our house at 4 Church Road (not that any of the food stayed around long enough to go mouldy), Mum would cut off the offending piece and we'd happily consume the rest. No one ever got ill from food poisoning.

Once a week, usually on a Friday night, we'd have fish and chips. Dad would go up the street in his yellow 1956 Austin van — sometimes one or more of us would go with him — and wait for the order to be cooked. Friday was a busy night at Greer's fish and chip shop. Then home would come this enormous bundle of steaming, greasy, fragrant salted fish and fries wrapped in newspaper. We would sit around the big oak table in the dining room, waiting for any stragglers to arrive. Then, on the word 'go' (and not before), we would hoe into it. We all ate as fast as we could for fear of missing out.

Forty years later, I was at my sister Jocelyn's house for a meal, and just before I finished, Jocelyn's husband Owen and their daughter Georgina burst out laughing.

'It's a dead heat!' Owen declared. Jossie and I had wolfed down our food as usual. Unbeknown to either of us, the other two had put rival bets on who would finish first.

* * *

Mum ran the house along military lines. We had to stand by our beds by 7.30 in the morning for inspection, and she would note whether we had made our beds properly and whether our shoes (which we hardly ever wore) were clean. She had a points system in place. By the end of each week, whoever had accrued the most points got a small prize. Because I always wanted to win the prize, I drew lines with pieces of white chalk on the red felt 'carpet' of our room and told my three brothers that 'anyone who steps over this line will get it.' Of course, they were all bigger than I was, so my threats were meaningless to them.

Us kids used to fight like hell in the back of the Austin van, and Mum used to get so sick of it. One day, about 10 miles from home and at her wits' end, Mum slammed on the brakes and told us to get out and walk home. I don't remember the episode clearly because I was only about five years old, but the story goes that I sat down and cried, Paul and John started walking, then John, older and more enterprising than the rest of us, stuck out his thumb and before long had a lift from a passing motorist. John prevailed upon the driver to make haste and take a shortcut. When Mum pulled into our driveway, John was casually walking up the verandah steps to the front door. If Mum was impressed, she didn't show it.

On another occasion, one of the bigger boys had come back from rugby training and wiped his dirty legs on a clean white towel in the little bathroom. Mum was furious about that. Of course, no one owned up to the misdemeanour, so Mum locked us all in the bathroom and gave us five minutes to decide 'who had done it'. Being the youngest boy and the most naive, the others told me to go out and ask her what the punishment would be for whoever owned up. So out I went.

'Mum,' I said, a quaver in my voice, 'if I tell you I did it, will I get a belting?' You can imagine what happened after that.

Being the fifth child of six, I spent much of my time trying (in vain) to get a word in edgeways. Ever-perceptive, Mum once bought me a children's book called Nobody Listens to Andrew. I have it still: the book has a yellow hard cover, and it exhibits the personal touch in the form of crayon drawings all over it in my very own pre-school hand.

* * *

By the time I reached school age, my mother and father did not like each other so much. I slept in the front bedroom with my three brothers — Nick, John and Paul. Our father slept in his own room adjacent to ours. Mum slept in another room down the back of the house with Fiona. When she was about nine, my sister Jocelyn decided to clean up one of the dusty, derelict tool sheds next to the bike shed and wash-house and sleep there. She painted the walls with black enamel paint and made her own style of gothic furnishings. Maybe out there she was the happiest of any of us.

It wasn't until I was quite a lot older that it occurred to me it was odd that my parents never slept in the same room, let alone in the same bed. Naturally we never went into the bedrooms of our friends' parents, so I probably presumed that everyone else in the neighbourhood had similar sleeping arrangements. Nor did I notice that my parents never gave each other a hug, cuddle or kind word (at least, not in front of their children). In fact, looking back, they seemed to avoid each other as much as was possible.

My father, Sidney Kenneth Cameron, was born in Calais, France, on 8 April 1926. He had two siblings: Renee Nancy Cameron, born in 1922 and John Robert Cameron, born in 1924 (still alive and kicking to this day). Their father, Finlay, was an electrical engineer and was a soldier in both world wars. During World War I, he was a lieutenant in the Royal Engineers and fought on the beaches of Gallipoli. He had been born at Stornoway on the Isles of Lewis in the Scottish Hebrides, the youngest son in a large family, mainly of boys. Actually, on his birth certificate it says that his family lived on Kenneth Street — perhaps that had something to do with my father's middle name, because we have a family tradition of giving people names that link them to where they were born. (One of my aunts on my mother's side apparently had 'Palmerston North' as a middle name, and one of my daughters has the name 'Porangahau' embedded in hers.) My father's grandfather, Donald Cameron, was the police superintendent for Lewis, and he was very popular on the island as he spoke Gaelic and identified closely with the crofters. According to a newspaper account of one of the incidents he resolved on the island, he was described as a 'blond giant'. I don't know what happened to those genes.

My grandfather Finlay was billeted with a French family in northern France during World War I and fell in love with their beautiful and gifted daughter, Adrienne Juliette Delhaye. The family were lace-makers and milliners. Adrienne's mother, Marie Josephine, ran a thriving business making hats. She employed nine women and used to go to Paris to see what was being worn, drew pictures and came back to Calais to have the designs made up. She bought several houses on the Quai du Rhin in Calais: she lived in one of these, and one of her daughters lived in another. Sadly, the houses were bombed and totally destroyed during World War II.

My father's family lived some of the time in Calais and some of the time in London in the suburb of Cricklewood. I have no information about their family life, apart from the fact that Finlay was a keen gardener and was London's official beekeeper during his retirement. He would be called on to collect wild swarms from around the city. Even once they had shifted to London, they spoke French at home. Like her mother, Adrienne was very skilled at sewing. My father, Renee and John all went to the Lycée in London, a school for French children, of whom there were many: the families of French chefs, diplomats' children, and so on. Not long before Renee died, my sister Fiona met an old lady, Hélène, who had been at school with my father and Renee. Her father was a teacher at the school and she told Fiona that her father regarded my father as the most brilliant pupil he had ever taught.

(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "A Nurse on the Edge of the Desert"
by .
Copyright © 2017 Andrew Cameron.
Excerpted by permission of Massey University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

TITLE PAGE,
EPIGRAPH,
PROLOGUE,
01 4 CHURCH ROAD,
02 SIX OF THE BEST,
03 NURSING, IT IS,
04 LEARNING THE ROPES,
05 'MALE IN THE TERRITORY',
06 CHANGE OF SCENE,
07 REMOTE CONTROL,
08 DISEASES, DENTISTRY AND DANIELA,
09 WORLDS APART,
10 RIGHT ON CUE,
11 LOKICHOKIO, WHY NOT?,
12 OUT OF MY COMFORT ZONE,
13 BLUE LINE, RED LINE,
14 THE ECONOMICS OF WAR,
15 ALL THINGS COME TO PASS,
16 BACK IN THE WAR ZONE,
EPILOGUE,
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS,
COPYRIGH,