A Plumber learning new skills
Peter Walsh loved being a plumber, so much so that the job became his nickname. Then one day, seven years ago, Plumber’s life changed forever. “Work was cut off, just like that. That’s the hardest part and that’s what I really miss, being cut off from people and having a beer after work,” Peter says.
On Sunday mornings Peter would help his daughter and son-in-law milk cows on their property in Cobden, in south-west Victoria. On September 11, 2006 the plan was to finish a little early before going to watch a local footy final. But Peter felt ill, vomited even, so he went home to rest before heading out again. At the footy things got worse. “My hands and legs were that cold I could have put them in hot water and it wouldn’t have made any difference.”
Fortunately, Peter did what too few men do when sick and took himself to the doctor the next day. A few hours later he was on life support in a Warrnambool hospital. “They said it would have killed me in half an hour if I hadn’t got there. My body was shutting down. Then they took me to Melbourne by air ambulance and I was in a coma for a week.”
Doctors told Peter he had the bacterial infection known as pneumococcal disease, but to this day the cause remains unknown. While he survived, Peter had to lie in hospital and wait six weeks and watch his limbs die. “They went as black as charcoal,” he said. Then all four were amputated. For his left ‘hand’ they cut muscle from above his elbow and attached that to his wrist. “It looked like a kid’s football, a big hunk of meat, which then shrunk. After three months they cut it and made an insertion for a thumb.”
For the next four and a half years Peter became totally dependent. He was given prosthetic legs but “Margaret (his wife) had to do everything. That was the worst thing for her. Close your hands and tape them up then see how many times you want to use them.” It’s a rhetorical remark. While few people could ever imagine what life without hands would be like, we do know what he means.
Peter took up the plumbing trade when his older brother took over running the small family farm. “There wasn’t room for two of us.” But there was plenty of other work around. “I saw a job advertised on a Wednesday and went and seen him about it on the Friday and started on the Monday, my birthday. That was 1961 and I was 15.”
The “him” was Thomas McQuinn, “a real good bloke” whose son Greg is still trading. “We used to make a lot of tanks,” Peter recalls. “They don’t make them any more – all plastic now. In those days a lot of people didn’t have running hot water in their houses. They had copper drums with a fire underneath it. So we put in a lot of water heaters in houses, running pipes to the bathroom. It sure has changed.”
Several years after completing his apprenticeship Peter established his own plumbing business in Cobden, mostly working on farms nestled in the fertile hills between the Princes Highway and Great Ocean Road. “I was fixing pumps on windmills and connecting water troughs in paddocks, fixing roofing… I worked with a partner – Tony Molan – for 28 years, and we had five or six others assisting at times. We had our equipment in four sheds and garages at the back of the old bakery. It was a big trade then.” Peter’s trade grew big in the mid-1960s when the state government opened up land for agriculture in nearby Simpson, which led to 400 new farms. “It was a good time for all tradesmen. I just had a van – my uncle’s old grey ute. My last one had a winch on it to pull up the deep bores at windmills.”
In March 2011 Peter received a phone call he thought might never come. Waiting for him at St Vincent’s Hospital in Melbourne was a hand from a donor whose tissue and blood type matched his. During his years of hospital visits, surgeon Professor Wayne Morrison had asked Peter to consider a right hand transplant, an operation that had been undertaken just 52 times in the world, but never once in Australia and never once on somebody 66 years of age. After reading some of the literature Peter agreed.
He was on the waiting list just two months, an exceptionally short time for patients awaiting donor organs, when the call came, and was on the operating table just a few hours after that. For the next nine hours surgeons used metal plates to join the ulna and radius bones, stitched together arteries, veins, tendons and nerves, before sewing up the skin. When he awoke at noon the next day, surrounded by his family, Peter looked at his bandaged hand, moved the fingers ever so slightly and said, “I can’t believe it. It’s really unreal. All my dreams have come true.”
In the two years since, Peter has regained some independence. “It’s just like a normal hand now,” he says. He can manoeuvre a wheelchair into his car and is driving again; he can carry a cup of tea, and a beer. He rolls the turf wickets at the cricket ground opposite his home and plays lawn balls with the help of a mechanical arm and says, “It’s more my legs that stop me doing things. I can’t cook and wash the dishes, but that’s because I never learned,” he laughs.
Some things he’s had to learn quickly. When word spread about the passionate Geelong fan’s recovery, Peter was invited to toss the coin before the 2011 AFL preliminary final, which the Cats won. “The night before I took a 20¢ coin outside and practiced.” And, as soon as he could put pen to paper, Peter wrote to thank the donor family for their son and brother’s act of kindness.
Trade skills are in the male Walsh genes – Peter’s twin sons Wayne and Leigh became plumbers and his other son Chris an electrician. Peter now accompanies Leigh on work trips as “the ground boss.” He could work a spanner in some situations but, heroically, says, “It’s gone, isn’t it? You can’t look back.”