The road down to Walhalla was narrow and windy but oh-so beautiful. The road looked like it was cut out of the side of a mountain. The rich, lush forest grew tall all around. We drove in slowly…very slowly.
Walhalla is an old gold mining town that is nearly a ghost town. It has only 10 permanent residents, though one hundred years ago it was quite large. It was the last town in Victoria to have electricity connected, with the power only reaching the town in the late 1990s.
The road down to Walhalla was narrow and windy but oh-so beautiful. The road looked like it was cut out of the side of a mountain. The rich, lush forest grew tall all around. We drove in slowly…very slowly.
Walhalla is an old gold mining town that is nearly a ghost town. It has only 10 permanent residents, though one hundred years ago it was quite large. It was the last town in Victoria to have electricity connected, with the power only reaching the town in the late 1990s.
It was 6.30pm when we pulled into Walhalla, oohing over the old railway. We stopped at The Wally Hotel for dinner where we discovered the food was reasonable. Peter, Susan, and Lucy knelt together on a bar chair beside me as I ordered the food. A hugely large man walked up behind them and said in a particularly deep, loud voice “Who’s been sitting in MY chair?” Peter ran for the safety of his own chair at our table, Lucy ducked for cover under our table and Susan remained rooted to the spot trembling with terror. All three children were pale and shaken, and he tried his best to make amends. Try as he might to apologise, the kids were pretending to be deaf and mute, so it was futile.
A short drive through the quaint, beautiful town took us to a lovely, grassy campground. It was clean, with a toilet that even had plenty of toilet paper in it. A small creek ran between the camp ground and the road.
The next morning, I got really annoyed at the people up in the bush behind us. They were running a motor, probably a generator, for ages from early in the morning.
We did some light four-wheel driving and had a bushwalk along a path from the campground across into the town looking down in to it. The kids were fascinated with the idea that quartz they found was associated with gold and wanted to collect as much quartz as they could to attempt a retrieval of the gold that may be inside.
The First Major Injury
We went back to the campervan for lunch, as well as a splash and play in the crystal clear mountain river to cool down. Disaster struck when Peter attempted to lift quartz slightly larger than a basketball, then lost his grip and dropped it approached waist height. His left hand lost grip but his right hand remained under and landed with the full weight on his right index finger.
The howls of pain were blood curdling and Jarrad had to remove the quartz pinning Peter’s finger before he could lift him from the river. I fetched the normal saline, diluted betadine, melanin and tape from the campervan then held Peter while Jarrad flushed his finger repeatedly with the saline. The betadine was applied then rinsed off only a few minutes later and the wound was flushed again and again with the saline before covering it quickly with a melanin patch and tape.
Susan had grabbed the panadol while we were cleaning Peter’s finger up and had measured it out for me to check the dose. I nodded at her that it was OK, took the syringe and gave it to him. She put it back inside the campervan door, and we buckled the little ones into their car seats; Jarrad quickly locked the campervan while I assisted Peter into the car. We had no phone reception to phone for help, so we sped into town and asked there where the nearest hospital was.
“You’d be going to Rawson, it’s the closest and they have a medical centre there. We’ll phone ahead for you to make sure they see you straight away,” the lady in the Post Office promised.
When I got back in the car and repeated this, Jarrad looked doubtful at the idea. “You realize he’s probably going to need surgery. You’re dreaming if you think he’s leaving the hospital tonight.”
“He might just need a few stitches,” I suggested, “You’ll be alright, Peter, you’ve just cut your finger.”
Jarrad disagreed, and in his stress forgot to comfort anyone. “That finger is mangled. I could see something white when I was flushing it; I think it might have been the bone.”
No one talked again the whole way to Rawson. Jarrad drove at ridiculous speeds around the windy, narrow mountain roads and this time no one begged him to go slower. Usually I’d be staring down the edge of the cliff, trying not to imagine the car rolling down the side of the mountain. This time, I just held Peter’s trembling body as sobs racked his small frame. I tried my best not to look at the finger.
Rawson turned out to be staffed by a single nurse who looked at it while I held Peter’s other hand. Seeing the finger was too much for me. I started to feel light headed and my vision was going dark. I left Peter with Jarrad and the nurse and went to the toilet, where I promptly vomited.
The nurse confirmed Jarrad’s opinion that surgery was necessary and it was out of the scope of the medical centre. He suggested a trip to Latrobe Hospital and again promised to ring ahead. After holding the finger together with another layer of melanin and gauze as the blood was seeping through the original bandage we departed for a trip at break-neck speeds from Rawson to Traralgon. That trip was worse as Peter started to go cold, pale and clammy not long after we got back in the car. We were nearing the hospital when he started to get really drowsy.
We did not wait long at the hospital, but X-rays quickly revealed a fractured right index finger. The HMO and Intern advised us that we’d have to head immediately into Melbourne and that they would transfer Peter to Monash hospital for plastic surgery to reconstruct the finger. The consultant was called to confirm this opinion and inquired, “What sort of family are you? Are you bushwalkers, musicians or football players?” He advised the intern to apply two steristrips to the wound and bandage it, with a course of antibiotics. I asked the concerned intern if he could at least bandage some melanin and gauze onto the wound. They gave him a tetanus injection, but never once asked if he’d had any pain relief or offered any to him.
He wasn’t much better in the car on the way home. I was relieved because I’d wanted to hear it wasn’t as bad as I thought, but Jarrad was fuming as he disagreed with the doctor’s opinion. Peter was still cold and pale, and very drowsy. When we got back to the campervan and I unlocked the door, we realized that the bottle of medicine that we’d given him for pain-relief wasn’t paracetamol – it was phenergan! The poor kid hadn’t even had any pain relief at all, and no wonder he was so drowsy! We gave him some paracetamol for real this time, and let him go to bed.
Peter and I spent most of the day playing board games with Peter, though we did all go on the Walhalla Railway which is a historic diesel train that winds around the valley and hills. Peter seemed morose and quiet. I fastened his arm into a sling in an attempt to ease the throbbing and continued blood loss. We had to change his bandages that morning and night due to them being blood soaked.
Into Melbourne For Plastic Surgery
The next morning Peter’s finger was visibly worse. We did not allow him to eat or drink anything other than water but headed in for the four hour drive to the Children’s Hospital. We arrived at noon, with the X-rays, having only stopped once to allow all children to go to the toilet and to buy Peter a small bottle of lemonade.
The plastic surgeon enquired if Peter had anything to eat or drink that day, and Peter replied pedantically, “Only water and 750ml of lemonade,” to the doctor and nurse’s amusement. “Mum and Dad wouldn’t let me have anything else because we were coming here.”
“That’s great,” said the surgeon, “Now because I’ve had a cancellation we can fix you up today. There was another boy who needed surgery, too, but he’s been eating and drinking today so he has to wait till tomorrow. It’s lucky you’ve had so much self control.” Peter looked pleased and proud.
It was 3.30pm when a tired, pale Peter entered theatre to have his finger reconstructed. An hour and a half of reconstructive surgery was needed to rebuild the finger that was apparently shattered like a sausage someone had taken to with a meat cleaver and barely attached. We were advised that he would need weekly hand therapy for at least two months to achieve optimal function in the finger. He was also going to have to keep the arm elevated for two weeks to help with healing.
He vomited five times from the anaesthetic and felt so crook that we only travelled as far as Jarrad’s parents’ house in Croydon and stayed there the night to avoid making a sick child travel the long distance again in the car.
Added much later:
A year later…that finger looks like it has a ‘Y’ carved into it. He says that it should have been the first letter of his name, not a Y. It only hurts him occassionally, and it actually looks similar to a finger, except for the odd shape nail and indents.
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About Amy and Jarrad
