As a child Lyn Rowe was insistent on trying for a swimming certificate. She tried repeatedly and eventually succeeded. ‘I floated on my back and wriggled and made it to the end of the pool. They gave me a certificate for backstroke!’ She brought the same upbeat mood and good humour to the litigation. ‘You have to be nice to me because I’m the evidence,’ she’d warn her parents and lawyers.
Lyn says she has ‘never’ felt sorry for herself. ‘I don’t believe in feeling miserable.’ There’s obviously some poetic licence in those declarations, but everyone who knows her attests that her low periods have been brief and relatively rare. In preparation for her trial we sent her to many doctors for examinations and reports, impositions she generally bore with good grace. ‘It was all right,’ she said. ‘There were some odd ones though. Like that elderly doctor who told me to start exercising to lose weight. Exercising is not easy for me, but I’m trying.’ Her relatively new exercise routine involves little sit-ups and trying to ‘suck my tummy in while I’m sitting in my chair’.
By late 2012 Lyn had millions of dollars in the bank. Yet she was not prepared to quit work: for many months she kept fronting up to earn her thirty cents an hour. ‘I’m not ready to retire,’ she quipped. ‘Also I want to give Mum and Dad some space. They can’t have me spying on them all the time!’
It was not until March 2013, more than eight months after her legal win, that Lyn stopped work. The decision, she said, was ‘devastating’ after almost thirty-five years, but things had gone ‘pear shaped’. Lyn got the impression that some of her colleagues believed she didn’t need to work anymore and shouldn’t be there. ‘Also, I was supposed to be receiving people arriving at the workshop and showing them around, but really we had very few visitors and I was doing very little.’ Lyn did not give up work completely though, and kept up a busy schedule of school talks.
Making light of her situation has helped Lyn cope. Years ago, one of her bosses at the workshop dubbed her ‘sexy legs’, a nickname Lyn embraced. ‘Once I left my prosthetic legs at the podiatrist asking to have my nails done. I love making jokes about it. You have to laugh. What else is there?’
Fifty years of scrimping and saving, along with their inherently unfussed approach to life, left the Rowes well placed to deal with their new financial situation. Almost all of Lyn’s money is tied up in trusts and long-term investments, with strategic decisions guided by an investment planner. Significant expenses require the consent of multiple family members. Not that Lyn was ever at risk of blowing the money. When I asked her whether she bought anything to celebrate her multimillion-dollar settlement, she had to think for a moment. ‘Yes. I saw a denim jacket at the shop that I really liked. It was about $80. So I bought two—a blue one and a white one.’ Lyn also treated her mother to high tea at the Windsor for her seventy-eighth birthday in 2012. Wendy had not been able to afford to return to the Windsor since her wedding night there in 1957.
Wendy and Ian initially found the post-litigation adjustment strange. ‘It’s hard to believe it all happened. It’s as though a whirlwind swept into our lives, tipped everything over, put it all back together but much better, and then vanished,’ Wendy said. The family is increasingly engaging professional carers for Lyn, lightening the load on Wendy and Ian, preparing for the day when Lyn’s parents will provide little care, and then, someday, no care at all. And their finances are obviously in much better order. ‘If there is something we need at the supermarket now, we buy it. We don’t have to stop and figure out whether we can afford groceries.’ The most extravagant purchase the family made was a small coffee machine. ‘It seemed like such a massive indulgence. We would never have considered that before,’ Ian said.
Wendy and Ian have also enjoyed a late-life window of freedom, leaving Lyn very occasionally for a weekend or low-key holiday. Each time, Lyn has paid one of her sisters to come and stay at the family home and act as her carer. ‘I love it,’ Lyn said. ‘The fun starts as soon as Mum and Dad leave. I used to hate it when they went on holidays; now when they go, it’s like a holiday for me too.’
Wendy might have embraced the change a little more hesitantly. ‘We’ve been very closely connected for a long time, so it takes a little while. Letting go after fifty years takes some doing. But it’s been liberating, for Lyn and also for me and Ian.’
In the years after Lyn’s claim finished, Wendy often found herself wondering about the meaning of it all. Lyn’s birth, the fifty years of struggle, thalidomide, the legal win. Why Lyn? Why me? Why us?
There are no answers, she’s decided. But still, Wendy is certain about some things. ‘A lot of good has come of Lyn’s birth. Was there a greater purpose? Did God have anything to do with it? Absolutely not. I just don’t believe that. It was the drug that damaged Lyn, pure and simple,’ Wendy said. ‘But once it happened, it was up to us to turn it into a positive or a negative. Lyn has showed us all what grace and courage and determination are and we’re better people for it. She changed our direction in life. You’d never wish what happened to Lyn on anyone. But there was no changing it. We had to dig down and find the good in it.’