Free Damned if I Do by Philip Nitschke

down to Alice Springs Hospital. I was finally released on crutches and spent weeks slowly doing weight-bearing exercises. After each operation, I would be back on crutches, wearing special boots to shift the weight up my foot. I was surprised at how slow the recovery was. I went to the Alice Springs swimming pool twice a day; I would hobble across it, taking advantage of the buoyancy, trying to avoid the lap swimmers. Then I’d be off to physio at the hospital. It was months before I could put my whole weight on my right foot. More than thirty years later, I still walk with a limp and my foot always gives me trouble if I walk too much.
    It wasn’t exactly a mid-life crisis—or certainly not a ­psychological one—but it was clear I would need a new and less physical occupation.

SEVEN
    Medicine in the Big City
    The ‘e’ word had never been mentioned at Sydney Medical School …
    Philip Nitschke, 2011
    I ’d never lostinterest in the idea of a career in medicine. Now, laid up, recovering from my accident, I thought I should finally apply. I sent off applications to everymedical school in the country. I believed my best chance would be at Newcastle, where they had a new and innovative admission policy, based more on a person’s character and ­experience, and so more suitable for a ‘mature age’ applicant such as myself. I was surprised to be offered places, for the ­academic year starting 1982, atSydney, Monash and Adelaide; Newcastle ignored me.
    A few months before, I’d metMarlies as I was ­limping about Alice Springs after one of my foot operations. German-born Marlies had come to Australia, some years earlier, to work as a nurse. She was in Alice Springs on a working ­holiday for several months, doing shifts at the hospital, and we met at an anti-Pine Gap rally. She was very much the new girl in town. At the time we met, she had a partner, Henry, in Melbourne and I was just about to leave Alice and go to medical school. We went out camping, which she loved, and a relationship started that was to last another ten years. When we left Alice, we planned to take the very long route across the Tanami, through Gurindji country to Katherine and down to Sydney. It was to be a great trip but, after a week of being flood-bound on the Tanami Track, we were forced back to the Stuart Highway. After a tearful farewell in Sydney, Marlies continued on to Melbourne and, soon after that, left for a long-planned year overseas with Henry. We stayed in contact for the whole twelve months she was away, with letters and phone calls to and from Sydney and Germany. Her absence would make first-year medicine particularly difficult for me, but with her return to Sydney in early 1983, as I started my second year, our relationship became firmly established.
    I’d never lived in Sydney before, and the idea of starting something completely new in a new city quite appealed to me. Also, theSydneyMedical School course took five years, while all the others were six, and at my age—thirty-five—six years would have felt like a big piece out of my life. I was lucky with timing, in that I undertook ­medicine when ­university courses were still free, but I knew I’d have to work, as my PhD made me ineligible for any ­government living allowance.By this time, I’d begun a ­compensation case against the army, and had hopes of a settlement that would help get me through medical school and into this new career.
    It was standard practice then for medical courses to have basic physics and chemistry units in their first year. I applied for exemption from physics and was refused. This was the first time I struck against an attitude at Sydney that would increasingly irritate me: that their medical degree was so prestigious that no outside qualifications could be of any consequence. I applied for a part-time tutorship in the School of Physics and, with my PhD in hand, was duly