Surgeon Ineke Meredith, photographed in France, where she now lives. Photo / Olga Gorodilina
Surgeon Ineke Meredith talks to Joanna Wane about life in the battle zone.
Ineke Meredith was already exhausted after a full day on the tools when she was woken at 2am and called back to hospital to operate on a woman in septic shock. While still “elbow-deep in her abdomen”, she was already being briefed on her next patient.
By 4am Meredith was in theatre again, patching up an elderly woman with a potentially fatal bowel perforation, when ambulance staff brought in a man in his mid-30s who had multiple injuries from a high-speed car crash.
“It was one of those nights when I felt akin to a soldier among the dead and dying,” she writes in her new memoir On Call, which opens with Meredith’s childhood in Samoa and follows her medical training in New Zealand and specialisation in general surgery and breast reconstruction for cancer patients — all while juggling life as a single mother.
In many ways, this particular night was nothing out of the ordinary for Meredith, who was 35 by then and already had more than a decade of surgical experience in her highly pressurised field. A trauma team assessed the car crash victim and admitted him to intensive care while she snatched a few hours’ sleep (safety protocols require only emergency operations are done overnight).
When she checked in on him and reviewed his scan and blood tests, he was sitting up comfortably and asking when he could get back to his mixed martial arts training. The next morning, a nurse rang to tell her he’d been found dead in his hospital bed. Within another 24 hours, both women she’d operated on had also died and she was under investigation in relation to the crash victim. “Weeks of sleepless nights ensued,” writes Meredith, who was later cleared of any fault. “All I could see when I closed my eyes was the man’s face. What had I done wrong?”
Meredith is at home in her Paris apartment, a stone’s throw from the Eiffel Tower, when she takes my video call. Her husband, Krishna Clough, is one of the world’s leading breast surgeons and after several years of dividing her time between New Zealand and Europe, she’s finally settled with him in France. Her son, who’s now 20, is doing an arts degree in London.
Still actively involved in research projects on cancer inequities here, Meredith tells me she loved her years in general surgery: the camaraderie of emergency work, the constant intellectual stimulation, the courage she witnessed from those with a battle ahead of them, the countless lives that were saved. “You feel like you’re a little team fighting this war.”
As a young doctor, however, you never imagine that one day you might have to justify your actions because they may have resulted in a patient’s death, she says. And it would have helped to come home after a tough shift to someone like Clough, who’d have understood exactly what she was feeling when she crawled into bed and cried.
Of course, there are plenty of uplifting stories in On Call and plenty of bizarre ones, too — although it might not be for the squeamish, with its staggering incidence of bodily fluids expelled explosively. A man in his 20s who’d been at a party the night before suspects some “missing vegetables” — a cucumber and a carrot — have somehow ended up in his rectum.
A convicted murderer is brought in with a gunshot wound after going on a shooting rampage while on parole. Meredith won’t confirm his identity, due to patient confidentiality, but the Herald understands it was double murderer Graeme Burton. “At two metres tall and 120kg, he was a formidable man for his size and frightened me even as he lay handcuffed to the hospital bed with a heavy police escort,” she writes. When his injured leg can’t be salvaged, she performs her first amputation, with a consultant explaining the procedure to her over the phone.
A man in his 30s is admitted after swallowing 35 fish hooks. After six days, his abdominal X-rays show they’ve all been safely passed and he’s discharged. Suspicions are aroused when he’s back the next day with 21 more in his gut. On closer examination, it’s discovered he’s been securing the fish hooks to his skin so it appears on the X-ray that they’ve been ingested. The likely diagnosis? Loneliness.
Threaded through the memoir is some of the deeply personal tension Meredith feels between her often-conflicting roles as a surgeon, a mother and a daughter. She was at high school in Samoa when she won a fully paid scholarship at the age of 17 to study medicine in New Zealand. Months before graduating with her degree, she found out she was pregnant — an unexpected turn of events that forced her out of the Samoan netball squad heading to Jamaica for the 2003 World Cup.
Surgical training required her to move frequently and as a solo mother, family support has been critical. When her own mother was diagnosed with cancer and forced to move to New Zealand for chemotherapy treatment, Meredith not only experienced the health system from the perspective of patient rather than practitioner, but struggled with guilt for not always being there in her mother’s final years.
A difficult relationship with her controlling father, now in his mid-60s, is explored as he slips into advanced dementia. The book also tackles some hefty sociopolitical issues, from the inequity of outcomes for Pacific cancer patients to the institutionalised misogyny female surgeons still face, including the bullying and sexual harassment she’s experienced from more than one senior consultant.
When her son was 12, they moved to Sydney where Meredith trained in breast cancer reconstruction. After stepping away from fulltime surgery last year, she now spends one day a week working at her husband’s breast clinic in Paris. The rest of her time is focused on expanding the business she began as a sideline back in New Zealand, Fur Love, a skincare range for dogs she created after her labradoodle, Charli, developed dermatitis.
Meredith was devastated when Charli, her “plus one” on all social engagements, died in 2020. With a home base finally established in France, she’s on the lookout for another canine companion, small enough to carry in a shoulder sling when she rides around Paris on her apple-green Vespa. Dogs are firmly enmeshed in the life of Parisians, she says. “But it’s even crazier in the UK, where you can go to the Ritz and order dinner for your dog.”
Meredith hopes people involved in making decisions about the health system will read On Call. She hopes medical students and young doctors, too, will read it and see — as she does — the beauty in patients and that there’s “something wonderful in this rollercoaster” choice of career. ”Nobody can really understand it unless they’re in the profession, and that can leave us very isolated,” she says. “There’s this real disconnect between what you do as a surgeon and ‘normal’ life when you come home. One hope I had for the book was that if someone close to a medical person read it, they would go ‘Wow, now I know what you see and what you do’.”
• On Call by Ineke Meredith (HarperCollins NZ, $39.99) is out now.
Joanna Wane is an award-winning senior feature writer in the New Zealand Herald’s Lifestyle Premium team, with a special focus on social issues and the arts.
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