Sinus Surgery the Old-Fashioned Way

Heroes Remember

Sinus Surgery the Old-Fashioned Way

Transcript

I had a little hard luck in a way. I had sinus trouble bad. It used to actually bother my ears and my eyes and my throat used to swell and all the rest of it. So I had gone, I got my foreman and he took me to Inverness to a doctor. I had been to him before. He said, “Get your small kit Mr. Austin, come with me", meaning shave and whatever. I never been in a place like that before nor since. You could walk in off of the street there and you just go in the hospital and do whatever you had to do. If you wanted an operation or whatever and you just get up and go home. So anyway, he took me down and that was by the way a new hospital that had just been opened by the Queen Mother and the Queen today and her sister, the Royal Northern Infirmary in Inverness, lovely place. So, it’s a memory I won’t forget either. I went in there and was well received. I saw a doctor and he already prescribed inhalations and cloud over your head for a couple of days. Next they said, “You have to go to the operation room.” Latched you onto a table and there was about three doctors and the man doing it was - I just forget his name now - he was a specialist, (inaudible) specialist. They stood there measuring what they were going to do and all I hear him say, “We’ll try 3/16th.” They drilled my nose with an ordinary drill.

Description

Mr. Austin describes being hospitalized for sinus surgery.

Stephen Austin

Stephen Austin, Sr. was born in Holyrood, Newfoundland on December 16, 1916. He was the second of four children and was raised on a family farm. His father was also a fisherman. In 1936 he started working as a truck driver. Mr. Austin went to England at the outbreak of war and worked in lumber crews. He enlisted in the Royal Air Force where he trained for a heavy engine mechanic. Mr. Austin served first in England, where he maintained the equipment which raised anti-bombardment balloons. After re-certification, his tour of duty took him to post D-Day Europe where he maintained military vehicles during the Allied advance on Germany. Mr. Austin married a Belgium national, and returned to Newfoundland where he worked as a mechanic. He later returned to France, working several years at the war memorial in Beaumont-Hamel.

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