By Callum Ludwig
A near-death experience for a Yarra Junction man has prompted him to share his story in the hopes of bringing emergency care services to the Outer East.
Larry Norman was walking down to his neighbour’s house on 25 October 2024 when he collapsed in pain, ending up on his hands and knees crawling to his neighbour’s verandah, though he wasn’t home to help.
Mr Norman was suffering from an abdominal aortic aneurysm, known as a ‘Triple A’, where the main blood vessel travelling through the body is close to rupturing in the abdomen.
Mr Norman said he tried to ring his son and his wife but couldn’t and was just saying ‘God help me’ to himself as a neighbour from the top of the hill drove down the road.
“He never looked up that driveway, but this time he did and saw me laying on the ground and rang Triple O, and in the meantime, my wife had rang my son and asked if he could play back the message, my son thought I was in Yarra Junction,” he said.
“They got there 10 minutes before the ambulance came, and I couldn’t remember this, but the paramedic pointed to my belly and said to tear in the aorta is behind his bowel, take him to Maroondah Hospital,”
“My wife, who was a nurse at Angliss, said ‘No, take him to Box Hill, there’s a vascular unit there’ and somehow I raised my head and told them to take me to Box Hill.”
Within two hours, Mr Norman was in surgery and four and a half hours later, the doctor rang his wife to inform her he was in a very serious condition and that Triple A’s only have a five per cent chance of survival.
“They put me in an induced coma and then on life support (a ventilator), on the seventh day, my wife was with me and I pointed up and she said ‘What are you seeing up there, angels or something’ and I just nodded my head yes, because I couldn’t talk,” he said.
“On the eighth day, they took me off life support (the ventilator) and they sent me up the intensive care for ten days, then they sent me to the vascular unit but I got pneumonia, and they had to send me back down to intensive care,”
“When they transferred me to Maroondah Hospital, I realised I’d been in hospital for 30 days.”
After some time in the rehab unit, Mr Norman was released just in time for his 30th wedding anniversary which he spent happily at the Upper Yarra RSL.
Mr Norman said now he’s grateful to God and everybody who helped to save his life and wants to see more emergency centres in regional Victoria.
“I know the Warburn Hospital sold in 2002 for $3.7 million, they had two operating theatres, it’s two-story, they had 25 staff and nurses’ houses behind it and nurses’ quarters, they refurbished it in 2020 and it’s still empty, they didn’t even use it during Black Saturday,” he said.
“With this mountain bike track coming around here, they’re going to need some emergency care, I started looking into other hospitals in the seat of Eildon, because I’m the president of the Eildon Branch of the National Party and the only emergency ward is Mansfield Hospital,”
“Yea Hospital has got a nurse and an acute care section, if you go in there, they call the local doctor and he does what he can do but if it’s too much for him, you get sent to a metropolitan hospital and you get the bill as a private patient, Yarra Junction Hospital closed in 1990 so there’s nothing around here and at Healesville Hospital, they don’t have an emergency ward and they close at 10 o’clock at night.”
A petition for an emergency department and maternity ward at Healesville Hospital garnered over 1500 signatures in 2021 but has seen no action, while the Warburton Hospital was the subject of bids from the private sector in 2020 but there is no current plan to reopen the site, which previously catered for over 50 beds and had 24-hour accident and emergency, a pathology lab, birthing suites, radiology and operating theatres. Eildon MP Cindy McLeish has also previously urged the State Government to attempt to purchase the Warburton Hospital site.
