Raising money for charity

is something I wrote about yesterday. This morning there is a long article about a "charity ball" held to raise funds for our Royal Flying Doctor Service.

For those of you who don't know about the RFDS I will need to explain. It is a flight based medical service to the "Outback". It is a charity, an air retrieval service which saves lives and does much more besides.

The RFDS has a special place in the lives of our family because my paternal grandfather knew John Flynn, the doctor who set the first service up in 1922. The Senior Cat remembered meeting him and hearing him speak in church.  Grandpa was a staunch supporter of Flynn's work and we all grew up being told how essential it was and still is.

I live on the smallest continent or largest island on the planet. There are vast areas of it which are very sparsely populated. There are places with no medical services at all and others with very few. To get to even limited medical help can be hours away by roads which are nothing more than rough tracks. In an emergency that simply doesn't work. Help needs to get there faster than that.

For a while I was seeing a doctor who had spent some years as an RFDS doctor. He moved on from there to the city practice but then moved on to something more challenging. He always wanted to know more about Flynn. The Senior Cat tried to dredge up memories but did not know enough to satisfy this man. We talked about emergencies he had attended and emergencies we knew about. 

The "Outback" is an extraordinary place. It is filled with extraordinary people and some of them do extra-extraordinary things at times. We knew a doctor who operated on the  heart of a man on the side of an unsealed road under artificial light at night.  The man he operated on survived to tell the story - and it was the RFDS which flew him out as soon as it was light enough to find them. That is something which occurred over seventy years ago. The service was still relatively sparse then. 

Now the service has 79 aircraft and has flown almost twenty-nine million kilometres. It has provided much more than urgent medical retrieval. There are medical and dental clinics dotted around the country. "Telehealth" or "zoom" like services make it much easier for someone to get advice and for a trained person to judge whether there is a need to call in that all important air retrieval service immediately. Every remote station has a medical chest set up by the RFDS which allows a doctor to tell someone exactly what needs to be used and how to use it. Refills are brought in by air on a regular basis. 

When we started the project for the Wildlife Network and I was designing the squares for the blanket I wanted to include one for the RFDS. Each of the squares on the blanket represented something of importance to this country and the RFDS one was particularly important to me. The Senior Cat suggested it. 

The design nearly defeated me. I am not familiar with planes in that sort of way. Then I remembered a book I own. It is called "The tap dancing lizard". It is a book of knitting charts designed by Catherine Cartwright-Jones. I did some research and found her on-line. I sent her a message, told her what we planned to do. It was an almost perfect size. It could be used as what we knitters call "intarsia" or as "knit-purl".  Could we use her chart? She was delighted to think it could be put to such positive use.

And so, there is a plane for the RFDS on the blanket. As I knitted it I thought of all those lives that service has saved. I am grateful the Senior Cat saw the finished blanket and that his eyesight was just good enough to outline the plane on it. I remember him saying he was glad I had managed to get that one in. I am too.