Lynette Rowe receives a loving kiss from her mother Wendy. Picture: Craig Use Source: Herald Sun
Ian and Wendy Rowe have cared for their daughter, Lynne, since she was born with no arms and legs. Picture: Craig Use Source: Herald Sun
Lynette Rowe was born with no arms and legs near 50 years ago. Source: Supplied
Lynette Rowe as a newborn baby. Source: Supplied
LYNNE Rowe was born with no arms or legs near 50 years ago. Doctors said let her die but her parents refused and took their tiny gumnut home. They have loved her every day since.
WENDY Rowe can’t remember much about the birth except the dead silence in the delivery room and the look on the doctor’s face.
He had delivered her baby. Now, as stricken nurses avoided Wendy’s stare, he braced himself to deliver the terrible news.
Her daughter had no arms and no legs.
Wendy looked at him calmly and said: “We’ll just have to look after her very carefully then, won’t we?”
With persons words, the 26-year-ancient mother of three started the first hour of the first day of the rest of her life. Her small family had been struck by lightning.
It was March 2, 1962. A Friday.
A time later, Wendy Rowe admits she can’t remember what she said to the doctor that day because they out cold her later and everything became a blur. But the doctor never forgot her grace under difficulty.
Dr Ron Dickinson is in his 80s now and long retired, but when a weirder recently came to question him about delivering Lynette Rowe in 1962, he recalled it clearly.
Mrs Rowe was the patient of another partner in their Nunawading medical practice, Dr Hugh Indian.
But Dr Indian had already been called out before Mrs Rowe’s contractions started, so Dr Dickinson stepped in to deliver the baby at Box Hill Hospital.
Time has not erased the shock of delivering that tiny limbless girl. But it was the mother’s bravery and unconditional like that touched him.
Not that Wendy Rowe felt courageous, then or now. Neither did her husband Ian, who was at work in the city when he got the call that changed his life.
The caller bluntly told him his baby had no arms and legs. Wendy still wonders if he ever completely recovered.
He ran to the station and caught a train to Box Hill. “But by then they had drugged me and I was out of my tree,” she says.
Wendy can remember just one business from the later hours: a doctor telling her she should place the baby in a home and forget about her “because she’ll be dead in six months”.
The suggestion repulsed her. But she agreed to place the baby at the hospital for a few days so she may maybe talk to her husband.
They drove their ancient Hillman station wagon to Mt Beauty and slept in the back. Not that they did much sleeping. There was a lot to talk about, but no argument; they knew what they would do.
A week later they went back to the hospital, picked up their small girl and took her home. One look at her face was enough, Wendy says, pretending to make light of the largest choice in their lives.
“Lucky you had such a cute small face,” she teases, looking at her grown-up daughter strapped in her motorised chair, and they all laugh.
“What makes these ordinary public extraordinary is that capacity to smile in the face of heartbreak, to look after each additional and to get on with it.
But positive thinking does not make it simple. Nothing is simple when your child has no arms or legs. Not even baby clothes.
The week baby Lynette got home, neighbour Edna Porritt made tiny sleeping bags to fit that small round body, not much longer than a man’s hand. She was the gumnut baby of Nunawading.
As the baby grew, Mrs Porritt made more special clothes, for a small girl who would never dress herself. “They’ve been excellent neighbours,” murmurs Wendy.
It’s now 49 years and three months since they came home from hospital and Wendy, Ian and their Lynny are still doing what they did in that first traumatic 24 hours: coping a day at a time.
They live in the same unpretentious weatherboard house they went into as newlyweds in 1957, when Nunawading was all gum trees, building blocks and unmade roads.
The liquid amber in the front yard has grown huge, they have a small white van specially built to carry Lynny, and the house needs re-stumping, but small has changed in five decades.
Lynny still eats from the ingenious multi-spoon gadget her grandfather made when she was small: a dozen spoons fan out from a rotating hub so she can take a pre-loaded spoon and then nudge it up your sleeve, ready for the next.
The front door screen has no snib in case there is a fire and Lynne has to barge through it in her well-worn electric wheelchair.
To visit is a rare privilege and a bittersweet pleasure. It is a first-hand insight into how the worst medical disaster in history made Lynette Rowe one of the most profoundly disabled thalidomide survivors on the planet.
But her tale is more than another tragic postscript to the tragedy of thalidomide, the drug that killed so many thousands and crippled thousands more.
It is a tale of ordinary public’s heroism; a like tale that brings a lump to a weirder’s throat.
IAN Rowe met Wendy Tudor in Brighton at the Male St Methodist church youth club in 1951. He was 18 and she was 15.
They played tennis and badminton and went square dancing. She watched him bowl well and bat terribly for a community cricket team. He’d taken it up at school and would keep before a live audience until he was 48, a Nunawading Cricket Club legend.
He worked at a city insurance office while she trained as a kindergarten teacher. Engaged at Christmas, 1955, they married in January 1957 at the church where they met, honeymooned in Tasmania and went into the house in Morden St, Nunawading, on Australia Day.
The house was £4200. “We had the £200, borrowed the rest,” Ian reminisces. They started out with an ancient table and fruit boxes to sit on – no curtains, no blinds, no refrigerator.
The Porritts next door – Stan was a returned Rat of Tobruk and Edna a superstar housewife – let them keep milk and butter in their fridge until they saved up the deposit for their own.
Wendy worked at a kindergarten for a year but stopped when she had Merrilyn in April, 1959. Two years later, Alison was born. There were no plans to have a third so quickly, but two months later Wendy was pregnant again.
This time Wendy was so ill with morning sickness she may maybe hardly bend over to pick up baby Alison without life sick. And she noticed something odd as the baby inside her grew: it rolled around in her stomach, like a ball.
Dr Indian’s practice was only a couple of streets away. He had a young family himself and was generous with his time, making house visits and offering samples that drug companies handed out.
He had been in the air force in the war and his father had been a Methodist clergyman. The Rowes liked that.
Dr Indian came around to the house and gave Wendy medicine: tablets and an injection. Later in the pregnancy, he gave her the drug Debendox.
None of this medication, as it turned out, was recorded at the surgery, which suggests he was using the drug samples handed to doctors by pharmaceutical company “reps” doing the rounds to push new harvest from Europe and America.
At that time, and for years afterwards, there was nothing to stop salesmen from handing out drugs at random – and small to stop doctors quick them on.
Some doctors, such as Ron Dickinson, were more cautious than others about what they gave pregnant women. Dr Indian wasn’t one of them.
Wendy Rowe did not know at the time exactly which drugs she had been agreed. And nobody knew about “thalidomide” – the sinister ingredient in harvest like Distaval, Contergan and Valgil, widely used before the Australian obstetrician Dr William McBride sounded the alarm in late 1961, just as overseas doctors were realising the same business.
The revelation came a few months too late for the Rowes, and years too late for thousands of others around the world.
After Lynette was born, Dr Indian treated the Rowes with fantastic kindness – and what his own family would see as an enduring mourn. He was their devoted family doctor for decades until his death in the 1980s.
Even if he initially tried to clarify the cause of the birth defects as a “virus”, it was never convincing.
It became increasingly apparent to the Rowes’ medical advisers over the years, including Dr Indian and his colleagues such as Dr Dickinson, that thalidomide was the logical cause.
The timing was damning – the drug was named as the cause of a worldwide birth-defect epidemic just three months before Lynette’s birth, even if it took a shamefully long time for word to spread.
DR Indian’s oldest daughter, Sue, remembers how anguished her father was about the Rowes’ small girl.
“I remember he said he’d agreed the mother drugs and that he was distressed because he felt pretty responsible,” she says.
Sue remembers the Rowes were kind to her father, with no hint of blame or complaint. “That small girl used to come and visit. She and dad got on very well.”
She can remember Lynette “coming down our driveway to show off her new wheelchair”.
The Rowes still don’t hold a grudge. At least not against Dr Indian, even if he gently steered them away from seeking legal advice and was shifty about the likely causes.
He need not have been wary: they never blamed him. Instead, they made the most of the hand they had been dealt.
It hasn’t been simple. For the first 12 months Lynny was “a bright small button”, says her mother. Then, when she was teething, she got a temperature that may maybe have been fatal – 108F (42.2C).
Without limbs to radiate heat, she burned up. The fever nearly killed Lynny and left her with brain hurt that unnatural her speech and learning. Wendy and Ian wondered what else may maybe happen.
Meanwhile, they had two additional small girls to look after. Seven years later, reassured that the drug would not strike twice, they had another baby.
Andrea was another sporty and gorgeous daughter who made them proud but who grew up in the shadow of all the extra care Lynette needed.
These are the things that can, and do, tear apart the families of persons with severe disabilities.
All over the world, parents of thalidomide children separated, or worse. Some had breakdowns. Some suicided. Some ran away, abandoning their babies to the care of the state, church or charity.
But the Rowes endured, decade after decade. Ultimately their additional daughters grew up and married and went on.
Three generations of children have grown up in the street knowing Lynny. A plumber who still lives down the road told them he didn’t realise until he was eight that she was different because he’d seen her all his life.
“To me, she was just Lynny,” he said. Ian and Wendy still laugh about that. So does Lynny. They’re as comfortable with each additional as any three public you’ve ever met.
At first, she went to a special kindergarten in Burwood, then for 11 years to Yooralla, in Balwyn. For 31 years since she has gone regularly to Knox Combined Industries.
When she started, she propagated plants for sale at a nursery, using secateurs in her mouth. But a exchange in policy finished that.
Even though she can answer telephones with a headset and use a computer, stick in mouth, these days she mostly sits in the passage to greet arrivals at the centre.
“I’m the bouncer!” she says, with the signature family laugh.
THE Rowes tackle life with humour and see the best in public, but it isn’t always a two-way street.
Once, in a supermarket, a boy followed Lynny’s wheelchair, making rude comments, until her sister Alison hissed at the boy: “If you don’t shut up, my dad will cut off your arms and legs too, just like he did to her!”
Conundrum solved.
Recently, a carer who was shopping with Lynny had to go to the lavatory. She left her in her wheelchair briefly in a coming up room outside. A mother with a toddler came in, took one look, clasped her hands over her child’s eyes and raced out.
“Don’t worry!” Lynny called out. “It’s not transmittable!”
How her parents laughed when she told them that tale. They have to. Crying doesn’t work.
There have been times when Wendy felt like it. Once, when their youngest girl was at Nunawading High, Wendy was on canteen duty when another mother said to her about Lynny: “They should place down public like that. Give them a needle.”
Near 30 years later, Wendy is still astounded one mother may maybe say that to another.
Lynny is 50 next birthday, and her parents are heading for 80. Over them hangs the unspeakable prospect: what will happen when they can no longer look after her, let alone when they aren’t around any more?
Ian Rowe is still as determined as ever, but he has a crook neck and additional aches and pains. They are living on the pension and admit having not much in reserve.
They are pleased they took Lynny overseas a couple of times, years ago, because it gave them shared experiences to look back on, but there will be no more.
Unless, maybe, the lawyers who came to see them last year win a landmark action against the German company that made thalidomide and sold it to a trusting world.
If that happens, Lynny Rowe from Nunawading will be known far beyond the street where she grew up. She will be the poster girl for an action that may maybe help hundreds of public like her around the world.
For the Rowes, a win would mean they may maybe re-stump the house and guarantee Lynny proper care and attention for the rest of her days.
And Lynny may maybe buy an iPad or a Kindle to read with. It’s hard to read books when you don’t have any arms.
Meanwhile, the Rowes keep on doing what they’ve done since lightning struck them on that Friday long ago.
Three times a week Wendy goes to a gym class to stay strong enough to help look after Lynny.
She has to be strong because three times a night she gets up and rolls her girl over in bed, the way she has nearly every night for 49 years and three months.
Friday’s child is loving and charitable, goes the ancient rhyme. This one gets it from mum and dad.
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