Tag Archives: farewell

Farewell Again

Hard work saying goodbye. I had to sweep the stoep again. Petrea and Louis had the small matter of bringing their Weber braai (my two non-Weber braais have gone off to Tom and Jess – I am braailess before I’m homeless), lots of steak, freshly home-made sourdough bread, peri-peri chicken liver in a large cast-iron pot, crockery and cutlery, bread board and knife, steak board and knife, ice, a large beaker of lime unt soda with fresh mint leaves from their garden and deck chairs; And Louis brought his hat; Jules brought delicious snacks; Sheila brought six bottles of white and three of champagne; Charles and Barbara brought beer and snacks and their delightful selves;

I had to do the rest.

Jolly good fun. Perhaps ‘Maritzburg’ will let us have another of these gatherings. After all, it has only been 120 days, waiting for ‘the paperwork’ since I sold my home.

~~oo0oo~~

Prof Chris Barnard’s Farewell

At the airport yesterday I saw a new book on Professor Chris Barnard by James-Brent Styan: ‘Heartbreaker’.

It’s fifty years since the world’s first heart transplant and the famous surgeon and playboy is in the news again, as people use the anniversary to look back afresh . .

A while ago I had found Aitch’s 1983 diary. Her entries to record her overtime as a cardiovascular perfusionist assisting during heart ops had abbreviations likes “palliative VSD 1.5hrs; MVR 1.5hrs; CVG”.

One of her entries in December was ’17h00 Wed 14 Dec Farewell for CNB, Nurses Lounge, Clarendon House’. I knew that CNB meant Christiaan Neethling Barnard as she worked with him at the time. She would run the heart-lung machine to oxygenate the blood while he and the other surgeons worked on the patient’s heart.

I had time before my flight so I  thought I wonder if they have anything about his retirement in the book? and flipped through it.

And there she was on page 216:

Aitch Prof Chris Barnard (2)

So I had to buy it to show the pic to Jess and Tom. Jess said “Cool”; Tom shrugged: “We knew Mom was famous!”

Aitch Prof Chris Barnard (1)
– there she is! –

~~~oo0oo~~~

A few years prior to this, Jess had been able to Show and Tell her classmates about her Mom.