Nadine Williams

The Cancer odds of 1 in 2 hits our home

Life has dumped a heap of dirt on us again with Olivier spending another 10 days in hospital with unmanageable pain.  The hormone treatment has failed to hold his advanced prostate cancer, which has now moved into his bone marrow and blood.

It is a terrifying time as his oncologist delivers this grave news on the Friday morning, two days after Olivier’s Emergency admission.  After lunch, eminent pain management/palliative care expert, Professor Ian Maddocks is at his bedside telling him how to use Morphine injections for quality of life.

He doesn’t want Olivier to return to our island home, but to stay in Adelaide.  This is the one piece of frightening news which we understand: His life is under threat.   Everything changed in a matter of hours.  After dinner, Olivier has his first chemotherapy treatment.

We don’t mention the unthinkable to each other and I marvel that he does not seem at all anxious with the diagnosis.

I spend my days and early evenings at his bedside and in my private hours, I cry a river of tears over the deteriorating state of his disease.   Suddenly there is anurgency to finish building our new  retirement home.

What a situation!  Our house is not even at lock-up stage, even thought the foundations were laid seven months a go.  One of his sons contacts our builder, Stellar Homes, and gives the grave facts – that Olivier is facing a period of palliative care without a home. They promise  to accelerate building and his son Herve reports that Stellar is planning to finish the house within six weeks.

I leave to visit the building block to make a list of trades needed to finish the contract and I pick shrubbery, some olive branches and some hardenbergia to remind him of our little garden patch, now largely decimated by the building process. It is a small gesture of hope for a future at Belair and race back to the hospital to  place it in a vase on the shelf in his room. He is pleased.

On the 7th day, nurses (a wonderful team of women and a fellow named Robert) take a blood test, after which he is hooked up for  a blood transfusion. Another follows on the 8th day, when he also receives steroids.

I am there at 7.15 am on the 10th day, another Friday morning to meet the oncologist, Dr Parnis. It is the day he is to be discharged and also when we find out if the chemotherapy has worked. Olivier is asleep, so I sit in the patients’ lounge and write notes.

Doctor sees me and quips “Now I know you sleep here overnight,’’.  “No, I simply have to be here to meet you,” I say. “Remember the one morning I wasn’t here you delivered dreadful news to my husband and I wasn’t there.”

“Well, we haven’t had anymore bad news,’’ he says.  My heart leaps as he adds “Come with me’’. We are overjoyed when he tells a sleepy  Olivier that although his PSA count is still very high, two other types of blood tests have shown that one element has returned to normal and the other has fallen to half. “It means that the chemotherapy is having an effect on the cancer and we will give you another cycle in a few weeks,’’ he says.

“Meantime, you can go home, but you  do need to follow Professor Maddocks’ instructions about pain management.’’

birthdays are beautiful

Birthdays are beautiful ways to celebrate life and love.  This year was my first Facebook birthday, which added an exciting new dimension to the many “joyeux anniversaire’’ cards, telephone calls, flowers, kisses, hugs and les cadeaux
(the gifts) I received. There in my email box was a long string of more than 30 Facebook greetings from  my “friends’’,
people I had known for years and new connections.

I remember reporting on a top 10 list of qualities needed to build relationships and gift-giving was one – along with
using terms of endearment. These are the all-important doing verbs of the noun “love’’ and my birthday over-flowed with acts of endearment – and celebratory events.

There was another dimension this year, too, to mark my 67^th birthday – an outpouring of kindness from friends.
Not the least of these was from former work colleague, now personal friend, Samela, who invited husband Olivier and myself to share a meal  with husband Bruce and their friends Barb and Brian on the night of my birthday.

Conversation flowed as freely until we were summoned to the dining table. A grand home-stuffed,
oven-baked chook, laid with bacon rashers made a magnificent piece-de-resistance. Its steaming herbaceous aroma filled the space as Bruce poured another top drop. Why did we forget our camera to capture such a delicious moment?

We slept over, too, and over scrummy scrambled eggs I gazed over Encounter
Bay as the waves rolled to shore. And I thought how friendship is such a human gift – one to the other and
how we glow emotionally in its warmth.

The adult children arrived on Saturday, Felicia driving from Melbourne to our island home while Tyson and Vanessa came from Adelaide where we adjourned to Currency Creek for a Duck-Off, a delicious feast of three great duck dishes from three competing chefs.

Somethiing was amiss, though, this night, because husband Olivier had to retire to the car half-way through the event
because of chronic back pain.  How could we foresee that the joy of my birthday, within days, was to become despair and
sadness as life turned over to another dark chapter.

A watery romance

Adapted from the best-selling novel by Sara Gruen,Water for Elephants, the movie is a Hollywood-style feel-good romantic love story set against the gritty background of 1930s circus life during the Depression in America.

Hollywood heart-throb actor, Robert Pattinson, is Jacob, the naive young veterinary student run-away,  who joins the circus run by Oscar winner, a dangerous Christoph Waltz as August and falls for his wife, Marlena played by Reese Witherspoon. and then there is the real circus performer, Rosie, the elephant, who almost upstages them all and a host of strange circus characters.

Director Frances Lawrence has used the backdrop of a travelling circus with the train a pivotal setting for the plot, written by screenwriter Richard La Gravenese. Pattison’s character, Jacob is the narrator, who tells her “You’re a beautiful woman who deserves a beautiful life’’. Yet, while succeeding in portaying himself as an animal lover, he fails in acting the heart-throb with Marlena. Christoph Waltz portrays August’s character to perfection – the charming circus owner yet the dangerous cruel husband the next, with his rubbery expressions deftly changing roles in an instant. Witherspoon captures the vulnerability and the dependence of  her character in the 30s, balancing it with a courage and tenderness for animals which endears her to the audience.

However, her portrayal of Marlena lacks the element of pure passion. That magic ingredient called “lust’’ is sadly missing from both Jacob and Marlena and so the movie fails to emit the passionate intensity needed to give Water for Elephants real integrity as a true epic film. Yet, the film still delivers an enjoyable, satisfying story presented in a rich, evocative manner.   It is well packaged with a talented elder actor, Hal Holbrook playing the 80-year-old Jacob to begin the story and round it off in a believable manner.

Some people will be upset by the cruelty to Rosie and the other circus animals, others will be annoyed that scriptwriters went soft on portraying the harsh reality of circus life in the 1930s.  But many – after the anticipation built up through the storyline – will be disappointed by the mediocre love-making scenes. It is a little shallow and fails to follow through with unpleasant consequences at several dramatic points of the storyline.

That leads us to the flashbacks at the end, which were pure Hollywood drivle and detracted from the movie-going experience. Yes, it is entertaining, but a little too shallow.

French chanteuse a classic Femme Fatale

French chanteuse Caroline Nin is set to deliver a fabulous dose of  Parisian Cabaret chic in her award-winning show “Scarlet Stories’’ at the Vanguard, in Sydney July 30/31. It will follow her performance as the classic Femme Fatale in June at the Elizabeth Murdoch Hall and her Sydney Opera House appearance in the Late Night lounge 12 months ago..

The sultry brunette, entices her audience into the dark charms of red light districts in Paris,
New York and Berlin the domain of les filles du joie work. And her alluring songs are of the pain of illicit loves, passion, lost men, tears and laughters of ladies of the night. Caroline’s smoky, sultry voice captures the decadence that embodies the seductive nature of love and sex which is paid for.

Returning to Australia after a sell-out show at The Lido in Paris, she says “it’s an honour to return to the Vanguard, a truly amazing venue with all the charms of Cabaret’’. However, she will also travel south to the Melbourne Recital Centre a few days later to sing “Caroline Nin: Songs and Stories of the Paris Lido’’ in The Salon on August 2 and 3 and on Saturday, August 6 from 8pm.

Her chansons from the legendary theatre on the Champs-Elysees,  ooze with the colour and excitement of feather-filled dressing rooms and showgirls, specialty acrobats and the world’s pedigree performers, les chanteuses, Marlene Dietrich
and Edith Piaf .

For further information about Caroline, visit www.carolinenin.com.

John Herbig’s harrowing China story

It is one of those harrowing travellers’ tales which bolts one to an armchair instead of flying to explore exotic places. Mt Pleasant man, John Herbig and his wife Sandra, wanted one more overseas trip before he retired from his managerial job at the Barossa Valley Council – and it was to be China.

“I wanted  to walk on the Great Wall of China,’’ recalls John of the trip which almost cost him his life. And he did walk the Wall with his fellow tourists in the Bunnicks Tour group, before they flew to a remote part of China, a town called Durban to  xplore the lower reaches of the Himalayas.

It was on the open chairlift  for the two of them that John began to experience what he thought was indigestion – a feeling which lasted the 25 minutes the chairlift took to reach the station way up the mountain side. “I mentioned to our tour guide that I had these pains in my chest which wouldn’t go away,’’ recalls John. “She promptly packed us both back into the chairlift and sent us down the mountainside again; another 25 minutes.’’

The guide followed and John, by this time in serious pain, was bundled back onto the bus which rushed through the streets of Durban until the streets were too narrow and a taxi took John the rest of the way to a military hospital. Military doctors immediately discovered he was having a heart attack, but language problems and the general state of the hospital meant that, although Sandra, understood the word “stent’’, she thought John would get a serious infection in that hospital.

Although they administered heart drugs to save his life, Sandra refused to give permission for a stent. Instead, she contacted their Australian travel insurance company who spent a few days checking out if John’s heart attack was a pre-existing  condition. “They rang his GP and luckily there was no record of any prior problems,’’ says Sandra. “The insurers then sent a Lear jet to pick up John and fly him to Hong Kong – 1600 kilometres away – where he was admitted to St Theresa’ Hospital.’’

If anyone wants a reference for never leaving our shores until the travel insurance is stitched up, needs to read on.

John was in hospital for eight days while arrangements were made for him to fly back to Adelaide with an accompanying heart specialist. Meanwhile, their daughter (my daughter-in-law) Vanessa, flew to Hong Kong in the wake of the harrowing drama, to support her father and her mother. John continued to make progress, but unfortunately he lost a third of the capacity
of his heart muscle. ‘That part of the heart muscle  died,’’ says John. ”But I still have 61 per cent functioning and according to doctors, the heart is compensating well.’’

Cathay Pacific flew John back home in business class together with the Chinese doctor, responsible for his safe travel. He was met by ambulance at the Adelaide Airport and transferred to the Royal Adelaide Hospital cardiac unit where he stayed for another few days until discharge. While his damaged heart will demand adjustments to lifestyle, – and John has no returned
to work – he can expect many more years of life, but he will be on medication from now on.

“Sandra has  the right idea when she said, “Let’s buy a caravan and see our own country.’’ Had they not taken out travel experience, the medical care John received wouldhave cost them thousands of Australian dollars, even before one thinks (shock, horror!) of the cost of the Lear Jet.

No wonder we not only celebrated Olivier’s birthday at our grand dinner party, we also celebrated John’s safe return after his life-threatening experience.

Fromages for Olivier

The Cheese platter for Olivier’s birthday – presented with  quince paste:

Before we tuck into the top selection of cheeses listed below, John Herbig recalls how the Quast family, who lived in Punthari, between Cambrai and Mannum would make the simplest of cheeses – quark.

“They would take a bucket of full-cream milk and put something in it to thicken it up. I think it was some kind of tablet.  When it thickened it resembled  junket, but it was actually home-make quark. They would then hang I t up until the whey drained away and then they would add caraway seed.  That was the tastiest cheese.’’

Then he led the charge to the cheese platter before us:

South Cape Brie – a soft goat cheese coated in ashes; Saltbush goat cheese;  D’Affinois, French double brie; Wooded blue goat cheese;  Roquefort,the King of French cheeses.