On July 2nd 1994 Ade was diagnosed with MS and our youngest daughter Kate got attacked!
She was 18 years old, driving home from work and noticed this odd looking guy on the side of the road. He was dressed in an army greatcoat and a pointed clowns hat.
Thinking nothing of it she drove on and all of a sudden this guy passed her and stopped in the middle of the road. She knew at that point she was in trouble! He got out of his car and started walking back towards her with something wrapped in a towel in his hand, she judged her moment and drove around him hoping to make it back to the safety of the main street of our local town.
She later said to me .... " Dad I was going passed the TV towers at Mt Lofty, I was going 110Kms per hr, the car wouldn't go any faster and he was banging into the back of me"!
He ran her off the road into a ditch and as she got out of the car he was waiting at the side of the car and tried to hit her with an iron bar! fortunately the top of the car door took most of the force of his blow and she went running down the road with this guy in hot pursuit. At that point and elderly couple came around the corner, she waved them down, they stopped to help her and the attacker ran back to his own car and fled the scene. This lovely old couple took her to the police station and Kate related her story.....she didn't want to press charges because she thought he might come after her and the reaction of the police was...." Well, if you don't want to lay a complaint, what in the hell are you doing here?"
Fast forward to the next night and elder daughter Sarah came home about midnight and told us there were a number of police cars in the driveway of our property! A woman had gone to a Tupperware party and on the way home she had been run into. Thinking it was just an accident she stopped to exchange details and this guy gave her a whack with his iron bar and shoved her in the trunk of his car.
Sorry, I know this is a bit long but there is a point to the story which has real significance for us just now!
This guy never noticed that the woman had a baby strapped in a baby seat in the back of her car and just took off leaving the baby helpless there in the middle of the night! The woman managed to get out of his car trunk and ran into a property and raised the alarm. All of a sudden the police realised there were certain similarities between this case and Kate's the day before and it was declared a major crime! They were vitally interested in every minute detail of what Kate had experienced.
Moving forward, physically it tidied itself up, they caught the guy and he committed suicide in his cell.....but Kate was a traumatized wreck, we had no level of contact with her.....it was like she was from Venus and we were from Mars! She was a rudderless ship. To make matters worse she had this 'shrink' and his lawyer partner acting for her, and she was encouraged to behave as an emotional cripple because the more she could illustrate to the court system she was a traumatised mess the larger her payout would be under the 'Victims of Crime' scheme, and the larger their fee would be. After two years we talked her into doing a hospitality course being run by a local restaurant, and the state government minister for employment and further education (Bob Such) gave all the inductees a pep talk and told them the importance of getting a skill behind them.
Kate got through that course and Bob Such presented her with her certificate and, she has never had a day out of work from that point on. She formed a relationship with a chef who trained under Maggie Beer ( A very high profile chef here) and they ran a successful restaurant for a few years.
That relationship eventually ran its course and Kate went to England working as a chef in Glasgow, Cornwall and London. When her work permit expired she came back to Australia just after the Boxing Day Tsunami in 2004 and did 6 weeks of relief work in Thailand. She vowed and declared at that point she wanted to be a nurse.....and preferably a disaster nurse!
She put herself through a nursing course at the Illawarra TAFE institute and she asked me to travel over for her graduation....she had been asked to speak on behalf of the crop of graduates.
The graduation ceremony was held at a large function centre and God, it was boring! The NSW government health minister talked about hospital budgets and bums in beds. The TAFE director talked about educations budgets and bums in beds.....bloody hell, get me out of here!
It came Kate's turn to talk on behalf of the graduates, and she briefly said what had brought her to this point. She then went on to say her first posting was to a geriatric ward in the St Georges Hospital in Kogarra. One of her patients was this little old lady who Kate had never heard actually speak....she just lay there with her eyes following any movement around the room. One day as Kate was close to her she grabbed Kate's face, pulled it down to hers and said....."My dear, you are so beautiful you should be in the Miss World Pageant". Kate thanked her but, had already noted in her case notes that this old woman was legally blind! This brought the roof in, all of a sudden there was some humour in the night, She went on from there and I sat there just so proud of her. Here was someone we had no level of contact with a decade before, and here she was, she had more than 1,000 people eating out of the palm of her hand, and she got offered a nursing position on the night.
I subsequently wrote a letter to Bob Such (who by this time was in ill health) thanking him for bringing our daughter back to us in our world, and I got a lovely reply from him. Not long after that he died and I felt blessed that I was able to have this interaction with him. We don't often get to acknowledge the good work that our politicians do.
Kate is so special to me, she is one of life's achievers and I am so looking forward to spending time....and a few nice reds..... with her over Christmas!
BRING IT ON!!!!!
Cheers.........Rob
