(excerpt from my memoir)

First time I had a tutorial in the hospital, we met the consultant in the Accident and Emergency department and then we were led up to the ward to observe a bronchoscopy on an unconscious patient. The room was small and stuffy and many of us gathered around the bed. One of the consultants was operating a piece of equipment I have never seen before and everyone was holding their breath. This was when I felt a man’s hand slipping under my coat and starting to grope me. I froze as he rubbed against my bottom, assaulting me in a room full of people, during a procedure that could have ruptured the patient’s lungs if I screamed or started any commotion. So I stayed frozen, in order to protect the patient from harm. I remember thinking that I would kill that bastard as soon as the procedure was over.

The procedure finished without incident and as the crowd started to disperse, I turned around and faced my abuser. He was a small, insipid man in a white coat, with mousy brown hair and a moustache. But his gaze was stone cold and very threatening. Before I could confront him, he squeezed a quiet threat through his teeth. He said nobody would believe me and that he would ruin my career before it even started if I told anyone. I was stunned, but he just laughed at me and walked off.

In later years I often asked myself whether there was something about me that singled me out for abuse. Was it the sadness in my eyes that always surprised me and made me hate my pictures? Was it my accent? Did he suss me out as someone with no friends and no support network when he saw me stand alone during the induction (“this is your first time in hospital as trainee doctors, this is what you can expect and what is expected of you…”) not really laughing or interacting with other students?

I had difficulty relating to people who spoke English. By this time, I could pretty much understand what people were saying to me, although thick Australian accents were still difficult for me to follow. My reading English was excellent, I wouldn’t have been able to get the grades if it wasn’t, but I really struggled with communication. In lectures I would write down what the lecturer was saying the way I heard it. It was mostly phonetic gibberish, which I then translated with the aid of a textbook once I got home, so that I could make sense of what they thought were the important things for me to learn. It is difficult to explain just how many books, pages and chapters one needs to read and learn for any exam in medical school. Unless you have photographic memory, it is impossible to just memorise books from cover to cover. In addition to learning English, I also had to learn a whole new language, a bastard child of English and Latin that was essential for medical communication. Still, I had advantages. I had good knowledge of biology, which many students didn’t as biology wasn’t a compulsory subject for applicants, and I learned fast, so I just about managed to keep my head above water. This left my social skills unattended to, and me without any support when I really needed it. And while I was at university, there was no such thing as confidential support service for victims of sexual abuse. In fact, abusers were fully endorsed by our medical school.

One of the ways we learned was to have dedicated surface anatomy practice sessions. During these sessions one or two students, selected by the professor for a certain quality that we were supposed to observe and learn that day, would be asked to strip to their underwear and the prof would draw on their bodies – whether this was a muscle, a position of a major blood vessel like abdominal aorta, a pulse etc – and then the students would take turns to lay their hands on our colleague and literally feel the structure, examine it, notice individual differences etcetera. It was a very intimate and invasive yet highly necessary bit of practical teaching that was invaluable later on when we were first learning how to examine patients. Mostly young men volunteered to be examined in this way, although occasionally a girl would volunteer too, typically one that played sport and was proud of her physique and who didn’t mind being touched. It was all very respectful and transparent, although personally I would have been mortified to be touched in this way.

When I first got in, we were all assigned a “buddy” from the third year. These students were meant to be our first point of call for advice and guidance until we settled in. My “buddy” was a girl who very early on warned me to do whatever I could to not be sorted into a certain professor’s surface anatomy class. Soon after, the stories began to circulate of girls in his group being fondled, groped and forced to strip by him, and that male students were encouraged to touch them inappropriately too. We were told by older students that this professor was a well-known pervert and that every year students complained and nothing was ever done. So after a few months, as this was the 1990s, feminism was strong and we weren’t going to stand for that sort of sexist crap anymore, we complained and complained, demanding that he be investigated or at least removed from working with students. The response from the School was basically to put up and shut up, and we had to endure a lecture in which another male prof gushed about this pervert being a genius, because did we know he was completely dyslexic and despite not being able to read at all look how far he got in life! A solution was eventually negotiated by boys agreeing to replace girls in his group, and soon after he stopped tutoring, in my opinion because he couldn’t get his kicks with no girls present. But what this situation communicated to me was that the man who assaulted me in the hospital was right. Nobody cared about my safety, and they would neither believe nor protect me, in fact they would probably collude with him to kick me out of medical school.