‘I haven’t got over her yet’: Renowned Australian doctor who’s saved thousands of lives reveals the ONE patient that haunts him to this day in tear-jerking interview with Anh Do
- Anh Do spoke with Prof Gordian Fulde about challenges in his career and life
- He said one of the hardest things was to watch a young girl die after a car crash
- Prof Fulde broke down when he talked about granting his fathers last wish
One of Australia’s most renowned doctors has revealed the one patient that haunts him after years of saving lives.
In an interview on Anh’s Brush With Fame Professor Gordian Fulde opened up about the difficulties of working in the emergency department across his 30-year career at Sydney’s St Vincent Hospital.
Anh Do spoke to the doctor, who he notes was one of the first to pursue emergency medicine as a speciality, about the challengers which Prof Fulde said he had long accepted as part of the job – but others still affected him deeply.
In an interview on Anh’s Brush With Fame Professor Gordian Fulde opened up about the difficulties of working in the emergency department across his 30-year career
‘It’s the patient who is still conscious, relating to you as a human being, who then dies in front of your eyes in spite of everything you can do for them,’ he said.
‘And I remember this girl who was hit by a car crying for her mother, as a child would do.
‘And I can absolutely replay it in my head anytime … that was sad.’
Prof Fulde went on to say how he has since struggled with those memories many years later.
‘In some ways you can say, I haven’t gotten over it yet cause… it’s the last thing you want, a nice girl….. it’s just horrible,’ he said.
In 1978 when Prof Fulde was only a trainee doctor he said he was first faced with the horrors of life and death when his father sadly passed.
Prof Fulde said one of the hardest things in this career was to watch a young girl die after a car crash and said he can still remember her calling out for her mother
‘My dad – very strict routine, and he used to go swimming Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and he was in the pool and we knew he had an aortic aneurysm,’ he told Do.
‘That’s the big vessel in the body which expands and then eventually will burst. And it burst. And only he and I were there. I fished him out of the pool.’
The veteran emergency doctor broke down as he recalled when ambulance officers arrived and gave him the decision to grant his father devastating last wish on how he wished to die.
‘They had the injection with adrenaline to put into the heart, and they asked me, ‘Do you want us to do this?’ And having talked with Dad, and I remember so clearly saying, ‘No.’ And then I had to go and say it to my mother — ‘Dad’s dead,’ Prof Fulde said.
‘That was tough because she’d seen us drive off. I’d gone home and I’d picked up Dad as a routine, and Mum never got over it.’