Patricia's death devastated me. Before this I had been a good Catholic, firmly believing that God was looking after His children. What was His purpose in allowing Patricia to drown? She was a girl of exceptional intelligence. She gave everyone the impression that she had lived this life before, she had such understanding and sympathy. I found it dreadful when people said how sorry they were. Nonie took Patricia's death much better than I did, or perhaps one's own pain always feels to be the worst. John, who was seven and loved playing with Patricia, missed her very much. There was only one possible salvation for me at this stage and that was work.

Early in my story I related how I had been called to see patients who had become paralysed and had died. At first this looked like an epidemic. One of these patients was a Nurse Van Rooyen at the hospital in Uitenhage, a town about twenty miles from Port Elizabeth. She had had an unhappy love affair and had started taking sleeping tablets from the drug cupboard on her ward to help her sleep. She developed abdominal pain and was seen by a surgeon, who thought she had an intestinal obstruction. He opened her abdomen: the anaesthetic, as was customary at that time, was started with intravenous pentothal, a barbiturate anaesthetic. The surgeon found no abnormality except for ‘adhesions’. When nothing else can be found, the surgeon may convince himself that there is evidence of old inflammation, due to tissue adhering together, which are known as adhesions. A few days after the operation, Nurse Van Rooyen became very emotional and appeared to be hysterical. She complained of severe abdominal pain and then developed weakness in her limbs. By the time I was called to see her, her arms and legs were paralysed, her tendon reflexes, the knee and ankle jerks, were absent, and she could barely breathe because of paralysis in her diaphragm and chest muscles. I noticed that her urine was deep purple after it had been left standing for a while. Nurse Van Rooyen died within 24 hours.