Fiona Wood is one of those extraordinary women who would arouse a murderous jealousy in other women if it wasn't for the fact that she's actually a very likeable person who laughs frequently and refuses to accept that she's actually anything out of the ordinary.
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| Australian of the year 2005 |
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Why not?
Right, if you're over-endowed with energy, brains and a persistent refusal to take no for an answer it is. When people told her that girls didn't do surgery, she tartly replied that she was very good at embroidery so saw no reason not to go into the field. When anyone had the temerity to hint that one couldn't juggle a surgical career and bring up six children, she simply asked "why not?"
So she had her six children and as she admits with a laugh, throughout her surgical training, she was breastfeeding continuously for 12 years ("that's why the last one was breastfeeding till he was quite old because I just didn't know how to stop"). She worked in tandem with her surgeon husband - the one emerging from the theatre would take the baby from the one just entering it. She sometimes did her ward rounds with a row of small children following her around "like ducklings".
Quakers
Today she's Head of the Burns Unit at Royal Perth Hospital and along with scientist Marie Stoner, she's set up a company that explores tissue engineering and they have a product on the market that is essentially a spray on skin that provides faster and safer healing for severe burns. She's come a long way from her humble beginnings, as daughter of a poor coalminer in Yorkshire.
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2002 Bali bomings |
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Bali bombings
Fiona Wood, was named Australian of the Year in 2005 for her outstanding leadership of the medical team that provided emergency treatment for victims of the Bali bombings in 2002.
The events following the bombings provided a turning point in Dr Wood's life - as a burns specialist, she was used to seeing horrific injuries, but the sheer volume of the sudden intake of patients taxed her and her team to their limits. A colleague of hers happened to be in Bali when the bombs went off and he was on the spot, attending to some of the most urgent cases before the survivors were shipped off to different hospitals around Australia. Royal Perth received 28 patients; the three who'd arrived earliest died from their injuries, but all the others survived and within three weeks, most of the rest had healed enough to return home.
Praise for all
Dr Wood was widely praised for her work during this time but she's quick to point out that it is praise for collective work from a large team; a team that included 19 surgeons - 12 operating at any one time - nurses, anesthetists, after-care therapists, nutritionists and so on. And it wasn't just the hospital staff - when she returned home after a continuous five-day shift, she found that friends and neighbours had been cooking for her family and making sure her kids got to their respective sports trainings.
Dr Wood admits that she'd always been very reluctant to accept help before, thinking that because she herself had chosen to have so many children, she shouldn't be burdening anyone else with the responsibility for their care. However, one of her friends took her aside and said to her "'What makes you so selfish that you can give and yet you're stopping all of us doing what we can do and giving ourselves.' And I was just knocked out of my socks." Fiona Wood laughs at the idea that this had taken her so long to realise. "It came as a lightening flash - that it's not a weakness to accept help."
| Click to listen to the story on Vox Humana |
Tags: Bali bombings, burns, career, Fiona Wood, raising children, surgery