What is with all the ducks in Dr Stuart’s room?
The duck story begins around 2020 with a young girl we’ll call Gloria (for that is absolutely not her name). She was eleven or twelve years old when she began developing what everyone thought was Tourette’s. There’s no good time for that kind of thing, but there’s something particularly cruel about it arriving just as you’re figuring out who you are. It gets old fast.
So Gloria, her family and Dr Stuart set off on a journey together: consulting specialists, trying new approaches, chasing answers.
Along the way, Gloria noticed something about Dr Stuart. He always wore cufflinks. His socks always matched his watch strap. And his tie, too. So when the time felt right, she turned up with a gift: ducky socks, a ducky tie, ducky cufflinks, three little rubber ducks, and a handwritten note, now framed on his office wall, that read:
“Thanks for helping me get my ducks in a row :)”
The flotilla
It was a very sweet and thoughtful gift, so of course Dr Stuart lined the three ducks up in a row right on top of his monitor. And that, it turned out, was a mistake, in the best possible way. Every child who came into the room after that wanted to hold one. He even lent one to a kid who did a full Maggie Simpson and sucked the squeaker clean out of it.
That was the day Dr Stuart retired the lollipops. In their place: little rubber ducks. To date he has given more than 3,000 of them to the children who’ve come to see him. It’s a vast, yellow, quacking flotilla spreading out across Perth and beyond, spreading joy and earning him nicknames like “The Duck Doctor” and “The Quack”.
In return, patients, friends, staff, and perhaps the occasional mischievous family member have given ducks back to him, swelling his wild and growing menagerie.
A small act of kindness from a young girl who just wanted to say thank you, and somehow it became something much bigger than either of them could have imagined.
Thank you, Gloria.
