RANDOM REMINDER

Press, Volume CVIII, Issue 31727, 10 July 1968, Page 20

RANDOM REMINDER

STOICISM

One does not have to have a profound knowledge of heredit and its legacies to appreciate the qualities running through a family of three living in a Christchurch suburb. The man is young and very vigorous, as a former athlete of especial note should be- His physique is matched by a most forthright attitude to all life’s problems. His wife, although naturally of much slighter physique, shares his health and strength, and is a young lady not easily daunted by the hurdles down life’s track. What more natural, then, than that their daughter, aged two years and a half, should exhibit a tendency towards vigour and robustness? It was this characteristic which led to a strange sequence of events. The little girl, notwithstanding several injunctions and pleas to desist, was using the couch as a trampoline. She succeeded in bouncing

up high enough to eut an eye on a window ledge. It was not a large cut, but the parents decided to call a doctor, who arrived in the wake of a young lady baby-sitter who had come for the evening and who professed herself so dischanted with the sight of blood that she simply had to go and sit somewhere

else until the child had been treated.

The doctor said the wound would have to be stitched, and he produced a hypodermic needle to anaesthetise the area. While he was working on the wound, a little blood flowed. The patient’s stoic, dauntless mother immediately fainted- Her stoic, dauntless husband simply seized her under the arms and dragged her away, her feet drumming quietly on the carpet, with the comment that nothing should interfere with the success of the operation, the completion of which was not being brought any the nearer by the vociferous

objections to the performance expressed by the child herself. The father rushed back quickly to help and was asked to hold the child on the kitehen table. While the doctor’s long, lean sensitive fingers were busy on their errand of mercy, father fainted in a large and somewhat ungainly heap, leaving the doctor with a needle in one hand and a vigorously objecting child in the other. Mother, staunch character she is, recovered swiftly, rushed back, seized . the child, and instructed the doctor to see to her husband first When the husband also made his come-back, he and the doctor homed on the shrill signals being emitted by the patient in another room. It all finished satisfactorily. The parents paced about outside, while the doctor completed his task with the assistance of the baby-sitter who could not stand the sight of blood.