Wings of hope

For Royal Flying Doctor flight nurse Sabrina Montaldo, Christmas will always bring with it memories of a dramatic rescue in the Outback.

Sabrina Montaldo

For Royal Flying Doctor flight nurse Sabrina Montaldo, Christmas will always bring with it memories of a dramatic rescue in the Outback.

Revealing untold stories of the RFDS flight nurses in Queensland, with the support of QSuper

When you read the news reports about a boat accident on Lake Julius near Mount Isa last Christmas Eve, the incident comes across as a little ho-hum. Three people were hurt. Help arrived. End of story.

Exhibit A, from a local newspaper: “A spokeswoman said the remoteness of the rescue complicated efforts.” Talk about burying the lead.

But speak to someone who was in the thick of the action and you realise that behind that emotion-free language, there was a drama played out over many long hours in which lives were hanging in the balance.

For Sabrina Montaldo, a Royal Flying Doctor Service flight nurse new to the job in Queensland, it was a baptism of fire. When she describes what happened that day, you get a true sense of how harrowing it was, not just  for the injured people, but the rescue personnel too.

Lake Julius is  about 70km north-east of Mount Isa, a popular but remote recreational area for residents of the mining city. In the lead up to last Christmas, the Moren family was part of a group of people camping there.

Ron Moren, his son Joshua, 20, and his  26-year-old step-daughter  from Brisbane were out on the lake when their boat smashed into a submerged log. All three were injured, seriously in Joshua’s case.

What followed was a complicated rescue operation involving some selfless locals, police, emergency services personnel and the Flying Doctor. Sabrina, 30 (pictured), had only been with the RFDS for five months and was still on probation. But that day she earned her wings and, as she puts it, “made the team”.

Based in Mount Isa, she and Dr Don Bowley had started work early on Christmas Eve, about 6am, transporting a patient to Townsville. About 1pm they were on their way back, 20 minutes’ flight time from Mount Isa, when they were alerted to the unfolding crisis at Lake Julius. Ron Moren had set off an emergency locator beacon and a helicopter piloted by rescue services volunteer Simon Steel with RFDS engineer Jim Lillecrapp as his spotter was first on the scene.

Jim waded out to the boat full of injured people. The team then radioed the RFDS team in the air and  made a plan to meet at the airport, with Sabrina, Dr Bowley and her gear transferring on to the helicopter to fly back to the lake.

“The helicopter was small,” Sabrina recalls, “but we ended up getting a lot of our equipment on there, which was good. I wasn’t too sure what we were going to need; we had no idea what the condition of the patients was going to be.”

Meanwhile back at the lake, another boat had towed the stricken craft to an area more accessible to medical help.

“We landed and Don and I ran down to the patients to see what was happening,” recalls Sabrina. “We think that when the boat has hit the trees, the boy has flown out and the girl has flown to the front of the boat while the father has hit the steering wheel. The son was deteriorating. He wasn’t really speaking and was having multiple little seizures.”

Another helicopter had arrived with police on board, but an ambulance from Mount Isa was still two hours’ away. Until it arrived it was up to the RFDS team to care for the injured.

“The father’s blood pressure started to drop and he became really pale and nauseous,” Sabrina says. “The girl was distressed and complaining of a pain in her back. It was very intense.”

Meanwhile, the temperature was hovering around 40C, and the battery life of the medical monitors was starting to ebb away. Sabrina was running out of IV fluids and pain medication. Then, if things weren’t already bad enough, it started to rain.

The RFDS team asked Simon and Robert to fly in the Salvation Army chopper, meet the approaching ambulance and bring back a paramedic with more equipment. The SES had also turned up.

“The father’s blood pressure just kept dropping and we figured he had a bleed in his abdomen,” Sabrina says.

The team placed Joshua in an induced coma, getting ready to transfer him out of Lake Julius.

“The son had stabilised  so the paramedic took the father in a helicopter and off they went,” Sabrina says.

“And then we managed to put the girl into another helicopter with another paramedic. By then, it was eight o’clock at night.”

The ambulance had arrived and Joshua was carefully loaded into it with Sabrina accompanying him. He was intubated and placed on a ventilator to treat his severe head injury.

“We drove through this horrible, horrible road. It  was just like rocks and really rough terrain,” she says.

“Our monitors were flying left and right, and our patient’s blood pressure kept dropping. When you tried to hang fluids or give medications, you kept falling over.

“We managed to meet the Cairns rescue chopper halfway about 10 o’clock. They picked the boy up and took him to Mount Isa, and we drove back to Mount Isa. I got back to the hangar at nearly midnight.”

Muddy, sweaty and hungry, Sabrina was keen to get home to her family, who were waiting up for her. The good news is that all three patients survived their ordeal and Joshua is now back working again.

Sabrina showed that day she had the right stuff to be a Royal Flying Doctor flight nurse, a job she adores. She recalls Dr Bowley, who has been with the RFDS for 25 years, telling her she’d never get a case like that again.

“Like, just logistically, being stuck in the middle of nowhere for hours. Trying to transport three patients. You know, normally a crew would just get one patient ... you don’t get three, and you don’t get stuck in the middle of nowhere.”

■ Sabrina Montaldo, 30, is a flight nurse and midwife with the Royal Flying Doctor Service (Queensland Section). QSuper is proud to support RFDS flight nurses like Sabrina through essential training, allowing them to manage a wide range of medical scenarios and emergency situations. Learn more at flyingdoctor.org.au/qld/QSuper