The man from Millaa Millaa making life and death decisions

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Most doctors can tell you the story of how they found their way to a career in medicine.

But medicine seems to have found Lachlan McIver on the lush green hills of Millaa Millaa, Far North Queensland.

Tablelands life had been good, and Lachlan was in no hurry to decide on a career.

One drizzly night, 16-year-old Lachlan found his father dead by the side of a dirt road, felled by a heart attack at 49.

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In his just released memoir, Life & Death Decisions, Lachlan recalls that bleak night and its aftermath, the self-sabotage, dark thoughts, and drink.

“Piercing through the anguish, I felt outrage.

“This was Australia and the 1990s, for Christ’s sake,” he writes.

“In my furious teenage naïveté, I believed that something had to be terribly wrong with our country’s health system if such tragedies could happen here, now.”

Determined to do something about it, Lachlan headed off to medical school, at Melbourne’s Monash University.

“It definitely launched me quite a long way down that road of deciding what to do with my life, in the distinct direction of medicine,” Lachlan told Tropic Now.

 “Then it just took me a bit longer to figure out that rural and remote medicine was the approach to medicine that most appealed to me.

“I wanted to devote my efforts to improving the health care and health outcomes of people in rural communities.”

To call Life & Death Decisions a memoir is doing it a disservice.

Clearly, Lachlan is a gifted storyteller, and the book is a genuine page-turner. Its accounts of memorable cases and dangerous situations make for compelling reading.

But it goes much deeper, shining light into the dark corners of now, where climate change, inequality, and drug resistant bacteria threaten health systems and humanity.

Lachlan said he started writing the book during difficult times and very challenging medical assignments.

“A series of fairly tumultuous events occurred, and I spiralled into a horrible pit of suicidal depression.

“Then I got despatched on a mission to the civil war zone in South Sudan.

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Lachlan practices what he calls ‘wild medicine’, delivering medical care in ‘wild’ circumstances like war zones, natural disasters, and remote areas.

He’s operated on axe wounds to the head, delivered a baby in the middle of a cyclone, treating severely ill patients with limited equipment and supplies.

“Having to take out a little boy’s appendix in the maternity ward on Thursday Island, by head-torch, because the operating theatre was severely damaged in a cyclone.

“We didn’t see that coming, but we knew what we had to do when the time came” he said.

“In Vanuatu, in 2015, after cyclone Pam, the worst to hit the country in living memory, at times I was the only doctor in the emergency department in the country’s main hospital.

“In the projects that I visit, from Mozambique to Madagascar, we regularly and frequently have to anticipate and respond to extreme events like floods and tropical storms that are getting worse over time.”

Lachlan is now an advisor to Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders) in Geneva, specialising in tropical diseases and planetary health.

But he’s still deeply involved in Australian rural medicine, regularly practising in regional hospitals and health centres.

“I’m forever committed to trying to improve the access to health care for people in rural areas, both in Australia and around the world.

“I’m helping to develop and implement health projects in some of the wildest, most remote and dangerous parts of the world.”

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Lachlan encourages Far North Queenslanders to consider careers in medicine.

“If young people have the drive and they’ve got the guts, it is possible to find a way to do this amazing kind of work.

“I’m just a kid from Millaa Millaa. If I can do it, there’s no reason why anyone else can’t.”

Lachlan McIver will be speaking about his book in Cairns on Wednesday 28 September at the James Cook University Badu-jali (city) campus. Register here