THIS WEEK ON RPA
Wednesday, August 22 at 8.30pm on Channel Nine

Andrew’s fall…
39 year-old Andrew is in big trouble after falling six metres through a roof on a demolition site. He is rushed to RPA’s Emergency Department in an ambulance with a large head wound and multiple fractures, including smashed knee caps and a fractured spine.

In part one of Andrew’s story, doctors make some tough decisions as they assess which one of his many injuries should be dealt with first.

Laurence’s time bomb…
19 year-old Laurence has been described as a “medical phenomenon”. One in a million children are born with his rare condition and not many make it into their teens, but Laurence is fighting on.

He has a complex congenital heart disease where several vital functions in his heart are missing. The late Dr. Victor Chang was the first to operate on him when Laurence was just seven hours old, he has had a further six lots of cardiac surgery since birth and now he is in trouble again.

Lyndal’s shock…
Lyndal, a 28 year-old mother of three young children, blames her constant headaches on bad sinuses. Instead she receives the shocking news that the headaches are the result of a brain tumour.

Lyndal is diagnosed with a five centimetre mass in the frontal lobe of her brain and she’ll need aggressive surgery to remove it. This is just the beginning as she waits to find out if her tumour is malignant.

Dominic’s tonsils…
It wasn’t baby Dominic’s crying that kept his mum and dad awake at night, it was his loud snoring! As he grew, he developed sleep apnoea and by the time he turned five, he was too tired to join in after school activities. Now he suffers frequent colds and inflamed tonsillitis that require antibiotics.

The culprit is a huge pair of tonsils that almost meet in the middle of this throat. Brave Dominic is told the cure is an operation that should put an end to sore throats and bad quality sleep.