sick, which focussed me; previously I’d had no direct lived experience of illness or hospitals. And a friend in the UK began studying medicine, and was very enthusiastic, but I thought you had to be a science graduate. Then I discovered that the RCSI aptitude exam was open to any graduate, so I decided to take it, to see what happened…’ ÓGLAIGH NA HÉIREANN Once she settled into the programme after the scary first semester, she found her strengths, including a facility ‘in doing things with my hands’. She had decided to specialise in surgery when a speaker from the Defence Forces came to the RSCI to talk about military medicine. ‘It interested me enough that I went to the Open Day, where I learnt about aviation medicine, which involves certifying pilots as fit to fly and optimising them after sickness or injury. I was always flight obsessed - my dad used to be a helicopter pilot - so that prompted another pivot, from surgery to military medicine.’ The five-year military medicine programme involves a year working in A&E, six months in psychiatry, and six months in general adult medicine - ‘accidents, mental health and general health are the core areas for military doctors, and then there are specific combat-related areas, like diving and aviation medicine.’ As a military doctor, Lisa is a Captain in the army, which involved doing ‘condensed military training - shoot and salute’. Under the Geneva Convention, doctors can fire weapons in defence of themselves or their patients, so she learnt how to handle and deploy weapons, which she loved. She also had to pass the basic military fitness test which, she explains casually, is ‘a minimum of 30 push-ups a minute, a timed sprint of 3.2km, and a 10k loaded march - that’s jogging with 15kg on your back.’ (It doesn’t sound very basic!) In January she will be sent on her first deployment, as part of the UN peacekeeping force in Syria: ‘The challenge will be providing primary medical care, camped in the desert with limited facilities.’ It will be a short four-week deployment because she now has a daughter, born in 2020. SPACE MEDICINE IRELAND Motherhood hasn’t slowed her down. When she was pregnant, she saw an advertisement from the European Space Agency for a space physician training course. ‘Space medicine is a bit like aviation medicine,’ she explains, ‘it’s about optimising astronauts’ health before they go into space, monitoring them through their deployment, and building them back up afterwards. Being in space is destructive for the body - without gravity, you get muscle loss, osteoporosis and facial puffiness due to body fluid shifts. And the increased exposure to radiation is an unknown risk.’ While the number of astronauts is statistically tiny, learnings from space medicine can be applied to the general population, and this is her chief interest: ‘Optimisations used in space can potentially be used to combat fraility in older people and people with injuries. And in terms of research grants, fraility isn’t sexy to investors, but space is.’ While attending the European Space Agency course, she met Philip Brady, assistant professor in Psychiatry in Trinity - ‘We started talking about aerospace medicine in Ireland and realised that there was no single body coordinating this so Philip and I started Space Medicine Ireland as a national network to bring everyone involved in space medicine research in Ireland together.’ While this isn’t directly related to her job with the Defence Forces, she thinks Space Medicine Ireland will ultimately be ‘of benefit to the army because space in the context of defence is an evolving area. Space enables surveillance, intelligence and missile warning, and increasingly it’s an operational domain in its own right, alongside maritime, land, air, and cyberspace.’ As she talks animatedly, the opening of Star Trek comes irresistibly to mind - Space: the Final Frontier - and I get a glimpse of the film producer who threw it all in to study medicine, and the future surgeon who gave up the operating table for a camp in Syria, and the military doctor who is now becoming a space physician…It seems a long way from the Classics student making comedy sketches, but Lisa insists that at a fundamental level she is still ‘helping people to tell their stories’. I ask what her TED Talk would be. After a moment’s thought, she says simply: ‘I think I’d encourage people not to be afraid of change.’
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