Life 2.0: How Dr Natalie Gordon’s second chance led her to medicine

“Many people take an unconventional path to studying medicine,” Dr Natalie Gordon says. And as she graduates from the ANU School of Medicine and Psychology, she looks back at hers.

It starts, about ten years ago, with getting sick. Gordon was working as a high-school teacher in Cairns, and found herself feeling increasingly breathless, tired, and worn out.

“I’d go to the school doctor and just sit there saying, ‘Something’s not right.’” She ended up in hospital where, she says, her condition was outright dismissed.

“I’d ticked the ‘Aboriginal’ box on the patient admissions form, and the way I was treated as a result was just disgusting. I was an educated woman and I thought, ‘If this is how you city doctors treat people from rural communities who have a Masters, then how badly are you treating the people who don’t?’”

After her disheartening hospital experience, Gordon was misdiagnosed. Then, when it came, the correct diagnosis was one nobody wants to hear: cancer.

“I had to have a Whipple surgery, which is a really serious operation. I had a lovely surgeon and obviously I survived it, but lots of people don’t. I was lying in the hospital, and again I had that stirring of like, ‘People here don’t have anyone advocating for them.’ I just felt this deep injustice in terms of how people are treated as patients.

“It took me a long time to get better and obviously in that moment I wasn’t thinking about becoming a doctor, but as a cancer survivor, you take life a little bit more seriously. Like: I’ve got life 2.0. Literally, I’ve got my time again.

“So what would I like to do?”

Gordon’s life 1.0 had already been eventful, including a decade-long teaching career, stints living in Germany and America, and postgraduate studies in theology. She even tried out being a nun.

“Most people do sex, drugs and rock and roll,” she jokes. “Not me: I went to the convent.”

“I just had a lot of questions about the world,” she offers by way of explanation. “I love deep thinking, and I love philosophy, and I love the big questions, so I thought I’d get a lot of fulfilment out of that.

“I didn’t last long. It was a contemplative order, and well, yeah, that wasn’t for me!”

Becoming a doctor had never seemed like it was for her, either – “I didn’t even do any science at school!” – until now.

“I wanted to be a voice. I wanted to be a voice for rural women. I wanted to be a voice for Aboriginal people, and I wanted to show doctors that we deserve the patient care we need.

“So I thought I’d sit the GAMSAT just to see how I’d go, because you know, I didn’t think I’d pass, which was fine.”

Then she passed.

She started her studies in Sydney but transferred to the MChD at ANU to be closer to Ngunnawal Country and her family in Goulburn.

“Then I failed first year,” she says. “There are no words for the personal shattering I felt. But I kept going, and I repeated it with the help I needed – and I needed a lot – and then some. Going in as an Indigenous student, I didn’t think it would be difficult to adapt to the way concepts are taught, but it was.”

Gordon names a long list of people who turned up for her with offers of learning and mental health support. But it was her experience with the ANU Rural Clinical School which “really saved my soul in many ways,” she says.

In her third and fourth years of study, Gordon spent 18 weeks in placements in Tennant Creek on Warumangu Country in the Northern Territory.

“With the misdiagnosis, having cancer, the operation, then failing, there were just so many difficulties to even getting there, but that was the turning point. Tennant Creek was when I could imagine a future for myself in medicine.

“I really found my people and my place. Being Indigenous, the bush is obviously a very big drawcard to start with, but, you know, I’m not from that Nation.  There’s just a real groundedness to the people there.

“People really care. There’s no ego. People don’t want applause. They bring a sense of justice to healthcare and a sense of deep care and love to the people who deserve a bit of help.”

Gordon’s unconventional path has now taken her to Broken Hill Base Hospital, where she plans to work for the next two years.

“I still can’t believe it,” she says. On the ward, she has to stop and remind herself she’s actually a doctor.

“So many people have supported me,” she says. “It really does take a village to raise a doctor. At the end of last year, my family said, ‘This is our last year at med school, Nat. We’re not going anymore.’” She laughs. “It’s such an Indigenous thing. My sister, my brother, my mum, my dad all saying, ‘We’ve nearly finished med school!’”

On her graduation day, she honoured her family and everyone else who helped her get there by including them on her ceremonial possum cloak.

“I asked all the people who have contributed significantly to my learning at med school to think of a symbol or an emblem that would represent them inside the possum skin, so it can be engraved in,” she says.

Professor Paul Fitzgerald has chosen a sulphur-crested cockatoo; Associate Professor Katrina Anderson chose a Celtic cross; Dr Mark Hislop thought about it for months and landed on a magpie.

“It’s meant to tell a story,” Dr Gordon explains.

“Each time you add another possum skin, you’re adding another layer to the story of your lifetime. It’s like a living book, right? And medical school was one of the most important chapters that I needed to tell.

“Lots of people have thought very deeply about what their contribution might mean, and that, to me, has been such a reward, because they’re on my lifetime’s journey.”