In 1984, at the kitchen table after breakfast, Lottie was still hesitating about selling the house. I was thirteen, resisting the idea with the kind of immovable emotional gravity that only children can manage. Roy was at the sink, washing up the breakfast dishes. She raised the subject again, gently, nervously, that maybe they shouldn’t sell, and stay here in Maryborough.
He didn’t turn around.
“Oh, it’ll be sold all right. You’ll get your bloody half and I’ll get mine.”
That was the end of a marriage that had lasted forty-seven years. A marriage that started in World War Two, was blessed with a son, survived the loss of a son, continued through the medical crisis and grief, celebrated an adopted daughter; 47 years, ended with 15 words.
The divorce and property settlement would unfold slowly, bureaucratically, over the following years. But in that moment, the damage was done. The foundations cracked, the promise dissolved, and whatever love or duty had once held them together slipped into silence.
What followed was not rebuilding. Not reflection. What followed was Serepax.
Doctor’s Little Helper
Before Serepax, there was Vincent’s APC powder. Aspirin. Phenacetin. Caffeine.
Tipped into tea, taken at the sink, sold over the counter, handed from woman to woman like advice. For nerves. For cramps. For pressure. For life.
Phenacetin was toxic to the kidneys. It caused silent renal failure. It was eventually banned—but not before decades of women had used it daily. Lottie was one of them.
By the 1980s, phenacetin was gone, but the logic behind it remained. Women weren’t offered support. They were offered sedation.
Enter Serepax. Oxazepam. The little white tablet that didn’t raise eyebrows. Not scandalised like Valium. Not brutal like Mandrax. Serepax was positioned as gentle. Appropriate. Feminine.
“Serepax is gentle,” they’d say. “And sometimes, that’s all you need.”
But Lottie didn’t need gentleness. She needed thyroxine.
What Serepax Did, and What It Didn’t
Serepax binds to GABA receptors. It slows the central nervous system. It calms—but it also dulls. It sedates without healing. It mutes without solving.
What it doesn’t do is more important than what it does.
It doesn’t regulate metabolism.
It doesn’t support cardiovascular health.
It doesn’t restore thyroid hormone.
It doesn’t correct the biochemical collapse of post-surgical hypothyroidism.
Lottie didn’t need to be sedated. She needed her endocrine system supported. She needed a blood test. A plan. A dose.
But instead, she was handed quiet.
Eighteen Years of Slow Poison
Lottie had her partial thyroidectomy in 1969. No thyroxine was prescribed. No endocrinologist consulted. No one followed up.
And for eighteen years, her body deteriorated.
She had previously used Vincent’s powders, damaging her kidneys. She smoked two packets of cigarettes a day—forty cigarettes daily—constricting her blood vessels and starving her tissues of oxygen. She was eventually prescribed Serepax, which dulled the symptoms but never touched the cause.
This wasn’t benign neglect. It was accumulative harm. It was a system that kept handing her silence and calling it medicine.
Her body was in contradiction. One foot on the brake, hypothyroidism slowing her down. One foot on the accelerator, nicotine and anxiety pushing her to keep up.
No one was watching the dashboard.
Her weight crept up, from twelve stone to fourteen. Her energy declined. Her skin changed. Her cognition slipped. Her emotional regulation shattered.
They said she was hormonal.
They said she was difficult.
They said she was just getting old.
They said everything except the one thing that mattered.
“We failed you.”
The Silence of Renewals
Every few months, she would visit the GP. Not for evaluation. Not for curiosity or care. Just for authority scripts.
Her Serepax was renewed, over and over again, without reassessment, without bloodwork, without anyone asking whether it was still helping—or if it ever had.
There was no hormone panel. No psychiatric review. No second opinion. Just a refill.
The treatment she needed was simple. The question she needed someone to ask was obvious.
“Do you think this might be your thyroid?”
But no one asked. Not in 1971. Not in 1977. Not in 1985.
Symptoms Reframed as Personality
Lottie wasn’t treated. She was blamed.
Her emotional outbursts weren’t seen as neurological symptoms. They were called tantrums.
Her swelling wasn’t myxedema. It was weight gain.
Her exhaustion wasn’t hormonal. It was laziness.
Her paranoia wasn’t biochemical. It was madness.
She wasn’t seen as a woman whose body had been mismanaged. She was seen as a woman who was hard to love.
And when a woman becomes too loud, too fragile, too unrecognisable, people stop coming. Friends drifted. Family pulled away.
Eventually, even the mirror avoided her.
This Was Not a Personal Failure
This was not a woman who failed to take care of herself.
This was a woman no one took care of.
What happened to Lottie between 1969 and her death in 2005 was not the result of poor lifestyle choices. It was the result of systemic disinterest, gendered medicine, and a clinical culture that mistook sedation for support. Iatrogenic hypothyroidism. Doctor-caused harm
She was not sad. She was hypothyroid.
She was not mad. She was mismanaged.
She was not a lost cause. She was abandoned.
The Auld Skald's Fudgel 