‘How the darkest times led me to medicine’: Dr Jana Pittman’s hurdles to becoming a doctor
“Does anyone know how many small people have come out of my vagina?”
Dr Jana Pittman is on stage at the AMA conference, a world champion athlete who for 20 years competed around the globe in the green and gold.
There is a certain energy in her movements. She still carries star power.
The answer to her opening question is six. And it is her family emblazoned super-sized in the images on the big screen behind her that is another story of a successful life, along with the fact that following her athletic career she qualified as a doctor before securing a place on the RANZCOG training program.
But her talk is about the darkness beneath the glitter, the many moments when things were breaking apart — and how medicine offered a lifeline at one of her lowest ebbs.
Her stellar career on the track as a 400m runner and hurdler was punctuated by injuries that must have seemed to her engineered to deny her what she wanted most.
She went to three Olympics — Athens, Beijing, London — and never won gold, never medalled, despite all the world records and victories. It was a ruptured meniscus, her right Achilles, and the fascia, all four years apart and in that order.
“My greatest failure has been the Olympic Games,” she says, “God that hurt, that was painful.”
She was pilloried by the media for her alleged failures, the fallen hero, enduring the ‘Drama Jana’ jibes but she also speaks of the collapse of her first marriage, her miscarriages, a major cervical cancer scare and the crippling belief throughout that she was not quite worthy.
Dr Pittman recalls when she was at a low point contemplating the end of her athletics career, a brutally honest conversation in a Melbourne coffee shop with her beloved mum, Jackie, the woman who made her dreams possible, opened up a new path.
“Jana, what are you going to do with the rest of your life?” she says. “Sport’s over for you. It’s finished.”
“I’m like, ‘thanks Mum!’”
“But when you were a kid you wanted to be a doctor,” she continues.
“And I’m like, ‘Mum, I’m about to move into your garage and I have $18 in my account and I have a kid that I’m dragging around. How does that sound sensible to you?’
“She goes, ‘But imagine if you walk across the stage one day and they say, ‘Dr Pittman’.’
“And suddenly I’m like, ‘God, yes that would sound amazing.’
“So, I sat that horrible [undergraduate medical admission test (UMAT)], which many of us have sat. God, that thing sucks but I dreamed of this amazing medical career I was going to have.
“Well I dreamed until I failed it miserably.
“I was sent seven rejection letters from the different universities telling me I just wasn’t clever enough. So that was it for me. That chapter was over.”
But 12 months roll around and her mum is on the phone telling her that it is UMAT time.
“No, Mum. Do I really want to prove to myself that I’m just not clever enough? Twice over. I have the best excuse: I was an athlete for 20 years.
“Well, you failed the Olympics three times so you’ve got two more shots at this at least.”
This time, Dr Pittman got in, no third Olympics required. But it was still tough.
During her years at medical school at Western Sydney University, she was going through IVF and having miscarriages. When doctors investigated they found she had CIN 3 cervical dysplasia.
“Twelve years of no Pap smears! Idiot, idiot!”
She says she was confronted with the spectre of a trachelectomy or hysterectomy.
But she still graduated, she did the hospital terms and, at the age of 41, she won a place on the RANZCOG training program.
“I can hand on heart say the day I walked across the stage and joined you guys as a doctor I cried harder that day than any medal that’s ever come past me, any experience that I’ve ever been through.
“Look, I’m probably the oldest trainee in RANZCOG history, surely?” she jokes. “But the things that I thought were the deepest, darkest, hardest days of my life led me to the career that I have now.
“I love running, don’t get me wrong. I still get sadness and stuff knowing the Olympics are on.
“But this week when they began in Paris I delivered my first-ever twins, not by myself I want to add, obviously.
“I’ve done lots and lots of births, but somehow I didn’t get to be present at a twin birth before. And I got to be the one that said to that family, ‘Here’s your beautif… Oh my God, here’s your second beautiful baby!’
“It was the best experience I’ve had in months. And to think that is the job I now have.”
As she ends her talk, she adds: “So as much as I’d like to say I’m [an] Olympic champion, I’m far prouder to say I’m Dr Jana Pittman.
“That is the story I was always meant to be.”
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