The final frontier Captain Dr Lisa McNamee, BA (2009) talks to Bridget Hourican about moving from Classics & French to film production, to the RCSI, to the Irish Defence Forces, to aviation and space medicine…and why it all comes down to helping people to tell their stories In her first semester in the graduate entry programme in the Royal College of Surgeons, Lisa McNamee felt overwhelmed: ‘Most of the other students had science backgrounds, some had PhDs. I felt I was playing catch-up and at our first postmortem, I was hanging back, out of my comfort zone. But then we started meeting patients and building trust, and this was something I knew I could do - putting people at ease, getting their stories. But some of the students, who’d been unfazed by the postmortem, struggled with talking to patients. That’s when I realised that we all had our own gaps, and you need a broad skillset for medicine, and disease is just one part of it.’ This is an insight few arts graduates will ever have because going back to college to study medicine, aged 26, is not a common trajectory. When it does happen, it’s often that the person has had a passion for medicine since childhood and didn’t get the points the first time round, but this isn’t the case with Lisa: ‘I never thought about being a doctor. At school I loved biology but I also loved English and languages and I wanted to be a writer or filmmaker, or both. I did French and Classics in Trinity as a way into writing and I spent a lot of time in Film Soc, making short movies and comedy sketches, which was great - I think of it as a brilliant environment to fail in!’ On graduating in 2009, she started working in film: ‘We were in deep recession but that meant I got to try out lots of roles in small, low-budget projects.’ She met her future husband, David Harte, on the set of a film, Charlie Casanova - ‘we were snowed into a hotel for a few days…he’s also a Trinity graduate though we didn’t meet in college’. When she became head of production for a documentary company, Planet Korda Pictures, her Plan A - to get into film and tell people’s stories - seemed to be going perfectly. And then she made the extraordinary pivot to medicine. The catalyst was ‘a few people in my family getting
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