Category: The Infernal Dames

The Price of Quiet

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.

Her Name Was Lottie

Where The Chiaroscuro Anthology was shadow and light, Infernal Dames is fire.
This series is a reckoning—with medical misogyny, with intergenerational trauma, with the systems that smiled while they failed us.

But like all revolutions, this one begins with a single voice. A single woman. My mother.

Her name was Charlotte “Lottie” Ford. Born Charlotte Bissett on 6 May 1920, in Maryborough, Queensland. Fraternal twin. One of four children. Daughter of Scottish immigrants. A nurse. A war bride. A mother. A grieving mother.

She had a goitre. She had hyperthyroidism. She had a partial thyroidectomy in 1969.

And then, she had nothing. No endocrinologist. No hormone replacement. No follow-up care. No apology. Just a neat surgical scar and a script for silence.

The years that followed did not bring healing. They brought unraveling.
Her moods swung. Her cognition dimmed. Her spirit cracked open and leaked out where no one was looking.

She was labelled difficult.
Paranoid.
Senile.

She was not given hormone therapy. What she had, independent of any doctor, was Vincent’s powders.

And 15 years later, I, her 13 year old adopted daughter, was running through rain in my school school uniform to the nearest phone booth to ask for help the way I understood help to exist.

Because that’s what the system taught me:
Drugs were easier to get than answers.

The Prayer

Lottie was forty-seven when her body began to buckle under the weight of grief, menopause, and spiritual resignation. The year was 1967. She was already bone-weary from years of quiet sacrifice—familial, social, and personal. And spiritual.

She had been brought up in the Presbyterian Church of the 1920s and 1930s. Where sermons were long and pews were hard, and women were praised for their silence, not their questions. Where suffering was seen as sanctification. Where grief was not a wound but a test.

“Shall we accept good from God, and not trouble?” (Job 2:10)
She had learned that passage young. The answer was not yes or no—it was obedience.

It was late April when it happened.

She was in the car with her twenty-year-old son, Warren. They were driving—destination forgotten—but she was “flooding,” as she later called it. Uterine bleeding, heavy and unrelenting.

She begged Warren to pull into a garage so she could use the toilet. He refused.

She sat there, bleeding, humiliated in front of the boy she had once held in her arms.
The son she had fought for—against Catholic schools, against family shame, against the shame of a Catholic-Presbyterian marriage..

And now she prayed.

Not for the bleeding to stop.
Not for comfort.
Only this:

“Just make it stop.”

Four weeks later, Warren was dead. Killed in a car accident near Murgon at 2:00 a.m. Out with friends who all survived.

She never forgave herself. She believed her prayer had been heard—and answered.

The Doctrine of Endurance

Lottie did not rage. Not then. Not aloud. She folded inward, into the only theology she had ever known.

The Presbyterianism of her youth had taught her that “women will be saved through childbearing—if they continue in faith, love and holiness with propriety” (1 Timothy 2:15).
She had borne the child. She had kept the faith. And now that child was gone.

What did that make her?

She had been trained in a doctrine of endurance. A woman who suffered was not to be pitied. She was to be admired, quietly, from a distance. To break under the weight of pain was not weakness. To speak of it was.

There was a time for everything, the minister had said. (Ecclesiastes 3)
A time to mourn. A time to be silent.

She chose silence. She had been told it was holy.

The Surgery

By 1969, her body had become a stranger. Her neck was visibly swollen. Her eyes sharp with a kind of startled brilliance. Her weight dropped. Her energy burned fast and erratic.

She couldn’t sit still. She couldn’t think clearly. She couldn’t sleep. Or eat. Or feel safe.

But no one called it hyperthyroidism. They called it “the change.” They called it “her nerves.”

Her goitre grew until it could no longer be ignored. She was booked for a partial thyroidectomy.

The surgery was nearly cancelled—her blood pressure was dangerously high. She was visibly distressed. But the operation went ahead.

There was no endocrinologist. No psychiatric liaison. No comprehensive review.
Just a scalpel. A general anaesthetic. A note to follow up with her GP.

They cut. And then they left.

Vincent’s Powders

After the surgery, her body slowed. Her moods thickened. Her fire became fog.

But still, no one tested her hormone levels. No one checked her blood. No one noticed the quiet emergency.

What she had instead was Vincent’s APC Powder: aspirin, phenacetin, and caffeine. Tipped into tea. Swallowed at the sink. Passed from woman to woman like an incantation.

It numbed the ache. Dizzied the nerves. And damaged her kidneys.

But it was all she had. That, and a dog.

The Dog

A black and tan Australian Terrier. A gift from her older sister—a woman she hated with a precision born of childhood bullying and adult betrayal.

The dog arrived not as comfort, but as substitute. A living thing to fill the space left by her dead son. A gesture of kindness wrapped in control. But the dog—he did not care about the politics of grief. He cared about her.

He jumped into her lap when she cried. Licked the tears from her cheeks. Stayed close when no one else could bear to be near.

There are griefs you cannot speak. But the body still speaks them.
And that little dog heard every word.

Five years later, I arrived. Another living thing. Not her child by blood—but there to fill the silence, to stand in the shadow of a boy who would never come home.

And though I called her mother, there were days when I, too, could feel the shape of substitution curling around me.

What Was Never Said

No one said “endocrine disorder.” No one said “hormonal collapse.” No one said “grief and menopause are not madness.”

What they said was:

“It’s just her age.”
“She’s always been intense.”
“It’s probably the change.”
“Don’t upset her.”
“Just keep her calm.”
“She’s doing her best.”

And behind all of that, the theology lingered.

“She will be praised.” (Proverbs 31)
But only if she cooks without complaint. Only if she suffers without spectacle. Only if she keeps her lamp burning at night, and does not disturb the peace.

What passed for care was containment.
What passed for treatment was sedation.
What passed for sanctity was silence.

The second part of Lottie’s file will be here tomorrow.