Mavis and Dulce

Mavis was one of six children in her family. She had an intellectual disability and epilepsy and was about five when her mother put her into a psychiatric hospital. Dulce explained that her mother was a single parent who ‘could not read or write very well’. ‘[She] relied on us kids for our help.’

Dulce and Mavis only met for the first time three decades later, in the 1980s.

‘My mother had told us that we had a sister … so I went out to find where she was,’ Dulce told the Royal Commission.

Dulce found Mavis in a hospital in a regional city.

‘They wheeled a person in front of me that had no hair on her head and was full of sores and very fragile with skin off her knees.’

A nurse told Dulcie her sister had ‘fallen out of the wheelchair, and that they had to shave her hair as she ate it’.

‘I was overwhelmed about what I was seeing and requested how I could get her out of the hospital, but was told that she was a ward of the state and that I would have to petition to have her removed.’

A staff member assured Dulce that Mavis was being cared for and warned her she was ‘aggressive, so she would be hard to look after’.

Dulce kept in touch. One day the institution called to say Mavis was ‘at death’s door’.

‘I was told she had eaten the leather off her chair, and it had become lodged in her bowel and they had to take part of her bowel out.’

Mavis survived the operation.

Wanting to understand why her sister behaved this way, Dulce asked to see Mavis’s medical records. A nurse told her they were destroyed in a fire.

‘I was upset and met with a head nurse at the hospital as I needed to be assured that she was being cared for. She said that I needed to accept that it was not easy having staff around the clock to keep an eye on her all the time.’

Dulce eventually arranged to transfer Mavis to a hospice near her so she could visit more regularly. When she asked that her medical records be transferred, the hospital told her ‘they had nothing, and that nothing had been sent with her’.

Mavis used a wheelchair, but spent a lot of time in bed and could not walk or talk.

‘The lack of medical history made it hard for me to try to explain why no-one could tell me or any professional as to why she was in that condition,’ Dulce said.

When Mavis was diagnosed with breast cancer a decade ago, Dulce ‘could not answer any of the medical or physical questions that the medical staff would ask’.

One day, Mavis’s doctor phoned to tell Dulce that her sister had syphilis.

‘I hung up and went to pieces. How does a woman in public care and private care who has been in care for 60 out of the 65 years of life and cannot speak or walk contract syphilis?’

Dulce contacted the police and tried again to find Mavis’s missing medical records.

‘I seemed to hit brick walls as everyone said, “Oh, that is awful, but it was so long ago do you really want to bring up the past?” People started to say things like, “Oh, you cannot make any decisions for [Mavis] anymore as you do not have guardianship of her.”’

Dulce applied for, and was granted, guardianship. Freedom of information requests unearthed records from previous hospitals, but there were gaps in Mavis’s medical history and no record of syphilis.

When Dulce complained about the lack of records, a government ombudsman suggested Mavis had contracted syphilis at birth, but could not show Dulce any evidence.

Mavis died a few months later.

‘There is so much I do not know about [Mavis’s] treatments prior to coming to me and to [the] hospice and I cannot imagine what has been done to this beautiful defenceless lady. I did not want to believe that someone had abused her.’