LIGHTS, CAMERA, EMERGENCY

MICHELLE'S FIRST DAY AS A DOCTOR MIRRORED A TV DRAMA!

- Emma Levett

It was June 2005 and Dr Michelle Thornhill's first day at her job in a hospital emergency department. She was fresh out of medical school but, as the day went on, she started to relax. Maybe being an emergency doctor wasn't so stressful after all?

But just as she was about to go for lunch, Michelle's first day was turned into something straight out of a TV hospital drama.

"An ambulance pulled up with a man who had a severely injured leg. It needed amputation," Michelle, now 45, recalls to New Idea. "He was followed by heavily armed police and then more ambulances arrived with people who had shrapnel injuries."

There had been a bomb in one of the cities in Trinidad and Tobago, close to where Michelle was working. What had been a normal day with a trickle of patients had quickly turned into a very demanding and chaotic one.

"I could understand how that might turn some people off, but I was hooked on emergency medicine from that moment," Michelle says. "I was high on the adrenaline and the sense of being needed to fulfil a role."