“ I came to Lismore almost a year ago today. I came here because my parents live in the area and I have a little 18 month old so my husband and I moved up. It wasn’t a hard choice coming from Sydney. We were in Bronte which is nice but a bit posh and not really my scene.
I was born and bred in Sydney and we moved to America when I was 15. After completing 2 years of high school there I left and came home. I didn’t like it. My family stayed over there for another year before returning. I think that trip instilled in me the love of travel and change.
I completed medicine at Sydney Uni and during that time in about 2005 I went to China and did a research article on the AIDS epidemic there. That was fascinating and very sad. It was about blood donation. These people would go out into the villages and offer the people more than a years annual wage to donate blood but then if you were type A and they were type A they would take your blood, put it in the same vat, sort out the plasma and then put it back into you so you keep donating. Consequently HIV spread like wildfire so there were villages where 60 – 90% of the population had HIV. I was lucky as both my parents are journalists and they were working for the Financial Review in Shanghai at that time so that’s how I ended up getting the link over there.
I did my internship in Wollongong but I wanted something culturally different so we moved to Darwin and I did my residency at Royal Darwin Hospital which was amazing. What triggered my decision to move there was it was right when the intervention was being rolled out. To meet people where English is their 5th language and it’s quite commonplace is just incredible. I also spent 3 months in Katherine.
I always wanted to work for MSF, Doctors without Borders so I did this refugee health course through James Cook University. I self funded, sold my car and I ended up going to the Thai Burmese border where there is a major border crossing from Burma to Thailand. I worked there for 10 months. There are about 250,000 people in refugee camps around that area and a lot of illegals living there, a lot of gem trading, ice and other illegal drugs coming across the border.
It was a Mae Tao clinic and I loved that it was set up by the Burmese for the Burmese. Dr Cynthia Maung who was the head at the time received the Sydney Peace Prize a couple of years ago. Here was I, 3 years out of medical school and I’m the only Doctor with a 60 bed inpatient department, a 25 bed Paediatric inpatient department. AIDS, TB, Malaria. At least one person dying per day and I only had access to 2 or 3 antibiotics. I would have to physically unclench my teeth at night when I was lying in bed. It’s interesting being in those situations because you think, Gosh! This is really stressful, but then you have the people living there every single day. I can go back to Australia and here they are, asylum seekers themselves having to remove catheters from the bodies. It’s a much more intimate association with death so you sort of think, Oh I can’t get upset.
You had to really think on your feet in terms of clinical judgement. I think I ordered 4 blood tests in the whole time I was there because you just couldn’t do that. You had to go off your examination skills which was certainly a steep learning curve. To be honest it was quite traumatising in the end. Things like Japanese Encephalitis where the patient is constantly seizing and you have nothing to give them.
There was one little 3 year old boy with golf ball size glands in his neck, vomiting and shitting blood. He had Dengue Fever and he also had Leukaemia. On top of that he had Thalassemia. Everyone said we can’t send him to the hospital because only if you had a 90% chance of survival could you go to hospital. We ended up finding a donor for him and he is still alive today and he’s now 6. He and his mother wrote a letter to me for my wedding saying thank you which was lovely.
I decided to do GP training because when I was over there I realised that you can have all this fan dangle equipment but really what have you got at the end of the day. You just have your own skills. That’s what appealed to me about General Practice and the variety. I loved my time in Darwin so I worked at The Aboriginal Service in Redfern for most of my time in Sydney which was amazing. Home visits in around Waterloo and the housing commission there. It was wonderful.
I secured the position here before we left. My husband works in IT and he transferred as well. We love it here. I think the thing I love most in Lismore is the people. There’s very few places where I’ve worked where people are so down to earth and so lovely. We are settled here now and very happy.”
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