Former paediatrician Elizabeth Green’s memoir details career as doctor, stint with Royal Flying Doctor Service

The first time Elizabeth Green thought she could be a doctor was at age eight. She was en route home with her father, a devoted Anglican priest, in a Bible Society plane that was diverted to pick up a man with severe burns when a Royal Flying Doctor Service plane couldn’t get there. In her newly released memoir, No Time for Makeup: The life of a flying doctor and paediatrician, Dr Green describes this moment as watching over her very first patient. It was these types of sliding doors moments that would follow Dr Green throughout her career. Another was in 1988 when an application to a general practice job got lost in the mail, and a spur of the moment decision saw Dr Green apply for a job at the RFDS Eastern Goldfields base, in Kalgoorlie. Then living in Melbourne, Dr Green received a call several days later offering her the job. She accepted. When the GP she’d applied to called her just five minutes later, eager to hire her, Dr Green turned them down. She had given her word to RFDS. “Turning up in Kalgoorlie, I was very green, and I was quite sweet, I suppose, in little red shoes and a long skirt,” she said. “I didn’t smoke, I didn’t drink very much. And so I just felt like I was very young, even though I was 28. “Over those two-and-a-half years in Kalgoorlie, I realised, meeting all the people in the stations, the communities, the other doctors that I worked with and the nurses, that it was a really special job. “And I did feel like a real doctor, because I was everything. I was the paediatrician, I was the anaesthetist, I was the specialist. “There I was putting chest drains in people and flying across the desert and looking after little babies. That made me feel like I can do this.” Reflecting on this time in her memoir, Dr Green writes it was “in the quiet corners of outback Australia that I gained the greatest trust with my patients”. “There is no place for power, position and opinion in the bush. It is a place for people caring for one another, trying to survive,” she writes. That became plain to the young doctor when, in 1990, she found herself not in the high-flying skies she was used to, but deep underground. Rockfall at the Lady Bountiful mine outside of Menzies, about 130km north of Kalgoorlie, had trapped a miner underground. A look in the newspaper archives shows the man’s 11-hour ordeal was front page news in the Kalgoorlie Miner. It was a dangerous operation, the second incident in seven months. The first had killed a man under four tonnes of rock. Clad in an improvised outfit of knee-length skirt, T-shirt, hard hat and oversized gumboots, Dr Green made her descent to the trapped man. “All the rocks had fallen from above him, and he was just hard hat, face, upper chest, right forearm. He was just covered in fine dust,” she said. “I was terrified . . . At times there’d be this rumble, and then rocks would be falling around you. It was incredibly surreal.” Several hours later, her patient emerged from the goldmine, seriously injured but alive. The miner was airlifted to Kalgoorlie Hospital for an emergency surgery pit-stop, before being airlifted again to Royal Perth Hospital. He later visited Dr Green at the Kalgoorlie RFDS office to give thanks. Dr Green’s memoir is filled with stories like this — of unbelievable courage and tenacity. It’s interspersed with the raw emotions of a young woman battling to find her place in a male-dominated profession, at a time where struggling mentally was not an option — especially not for women. She credits the late Dr Rex Henderson, esteemed paediatrician and neonatologist, for recognising her gift with children and recommending she train as a paediatrician. He even organised her training at Princess Margaret Children’s Hospital. Described in her memoir as “a seven-year journey of passion, pace and pain”, Dr Green treated two children with meningitis on her first night shift, a rare occurrence for any doctor. It would be the first of many rare occasions: some joyful, others tragic. One night shift, Dr Green unexpectedly delivered a healthy baby on the eighth floor of PMH. On another, she did her best to save a toddler from meningococcal, but it wasn’t enough. Pondering what she could’ve done better, the paediatric consultant reminded her that her patient had meningococcal, so “death already had a head start”. Today, Dr Green is acutely aware of the dangerous situations in which the medical culture of the early 1990s put her and other doctors. The overnight shift at PMH meant one registrar and two residents were responsible for every patient in the hospital, including emergency. Her time at King Edward Memorial Hospital haunts her to the point she refuses to drive past it, more than 30 years later. “The terms I did as a paediatric registrar at Princess Margaret Hospital and at King Edward were really quite traumatic,” she said. A particularly harrowing experience was a severe outbreak of a nasty bacterial infection at KEMH in 1991, including the neonatal intensive care unit. “It was really terrible. There were about 70 babies on ventilators,” Dr Green said. “I was one person for 14 hours running between three nurseries, now three ICUs, with 70 babies. No time to have anything to eat or drink, plus theatre if there was any baby in theatre, plus the wards, plus labour.” When babies died, there was no feedback. “The death of a child and the death of a baby is the worst thing,” Dr Green said. “As a doctor, you carry all those deaths with you as if they were part of you. You do your best, and sometimes your best isn’t enough, which is really hard.” In 1998, Dr Green became a private paediatrician. It was this time in her career that allowed her to be with patients at every milestone, to really pay attention and connect with the children she treated. Her only regret is not being there in her two daughters’ early years as much as she would have liked. Dr Green hopes any prospective parents who pick up her memoir will think carefully about how they’ll work towards “work-life balance”. “I think you only get a chance once with early childhood,” she says. “You have to get that balance as good as you can . . . because if you don’t look after your family, then you can’t look after your patients as well either.” She also hopes it helps mend what she believes is the broken relationship between patients and doctors. “The whole relationship between patients and doctors has become so combative, and I think the trust is eroded, which is really why I wrote the book, because I really wanted to show the heart and soul of medicine, and the compassion. “And I wanted to show the vulnerability of being a young doctor. I wanted to say we care and that we walk with you.” No Time for Makeup is available online at Amazon and at all good bookshops.