Cooking with Courage

At an age when most teenage girls are dreaming about falling in love and the freedom of finally leaving school to become independent adults, Doreen Baker was coping with the devastating reality that she was blind.

Doreen permanently and completely lost her eyesight when she was seventeen, after surgery to remove a brain tumour. Filled with admiration for her courage, nurses at the Royal Prince Alfred Hospital in Sydney sat at Doreen’s bedside, holding her hand and weeping as she fought to survive. ‘They didn’t tell us this until later, but they put her into a room where they only put people who were dying,’ recalls her older sister, Isobel Bond.