Paediatrician, David Meldrum, initially studied engineering
at university, but left halfway through his degree. “I couldn’t stand it, quite
frankly the maths was beyond me!” he exclaims, sitting in his office in Lismore
Base Hospital. After a break working and travelling, David thought he’d give
medicine a try, and hasn’t looked back.
After finishing his medical degree in Melbourne, where he
grew up, David took a year off to travel in Australia and overseas. He settled
in Sydney when he returned, and there met his wife, Kim, who had also just been
travelling the globe. It was 1996 and Kim had recently emigrated from England.
The two met at a party and immediately hit it off, swapped suitcase stories, and
it turned out they’d been to a lot of the same places, right down to both having
stayed with the same family in the same yurt in a remote village in western
China.
David, Kim and their two boys, Ross, now 10, and Connor, almost
12, moved to Eureka in 2008 after David got a job at Lismore Base Hospital. During
his training years as a young doctor, David had done a three-month stint in
Lismore in 2000. He had always been a city person and had supposed that “living
in the bush sounds nice in theory but in practice it’s probably different”. To
his and Kim’s surprise, they absolutely loved it.
So, when they were looking to escape from Melbourne later on,
David jumped at the chance to come back to this area and try living outside a
major city. “A job came up here so we thought we’d give it a go”, he says. Where
they found Melbourne hard work with kids, with lots of time in the car and
difficulty meeting new people, David and Kim loved the welcoming atmosphere
around the Northern Rivers, with its warm people and alternative lifestyle.
Originally planning to live in Bangalow or Clunes, the
family weren’t anticipating living on a property out of town, but when they
found 5 acres at Eureka they loved it at first sight.
When he began medical training, David originally wanted to be
a general practitioner, but soon found he didn’t enjoy adult medicine as much
as he though he would, with its heavy focus on treating degenerative diseases
and people at the end of their lives. David realised he was more interested in
acute illnesses in younger people, and gave paediatrics a try, not expecting much.
“I just loved it right from the first
day”, he says.
When he’s not saving babies and curing kids, David loves
going bushwalking and kayaking. He admits to getting a little bit worried with
all the shark attacks when he’s out in the ocean at Byron Bay. “I frequently
see sharks but they don’t seem interested in me on the kayak”, he says,
thankfully.
David notes that, contrary to what he was taught in medical
school, a large proportion of a paediatrician’s workload is in fact dealing
with societal and other issues. “A lot
of paediatrics now is social chaos and the diseases of neglect, poverty, drug
use, violence, and I feel like it’s very hard to make a difference there”, he
says. “Presumably those problems always existed but there wasn’t always an
expectation for a paediatrician to come up with an immediate fix.”
That’s one of the challenging aspects of his work, says
David. While he likes to think he’s making a difference, David admits to sometimes
feeling powerless to effect much in the way of positive change.
David smiles when he recalls how he has been fortunate to
end up in his current career, in his current environment, thanks to a willingness
to be open to new experiences. “I guess that’s been a bit of a story of my
life, of trying things expecting not to like it and then it turns out to be great.”
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