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Transcription
Jenny, a medical doctor, is a guest on a podcast and shares her experience working in Ukraine, providing medical relief to injured soldiers. She discusses the ongoing conflict and the generosity of people in providing aid. Jenny then shares her personal experience of stepping on a landmine and the injuries she sustained. She talks about the immediate aftermath and the challenges she faced in getting to safety. Despite the seriousness of her injuries, Jenny remains determined to recover and return to Ukraine to continue helping others. Welcome to the seventh episode of Seek Professional Help. Now, today is definitely the most exciting episode we've done, because for the first time, we've got a guest with us, a real person. So we know that at least one person listens to what we're talking about, and to be honest, I thought we'd start with our guests being relatively mundane, but I actually think as podcasts go, we've peaked, and I don't really know where we're going to go after that, so a lot of pressure. I'll introduce Jenny briefly, because I've met her and worked with her for a little while, but then I want you to take over and go for it. So Jenny has allowed me to use her name. We're not going for Sarah. Sarah Smith. I don't give away all my secrets in the first five minutes. Jenny is a fake Kiwi. She's actually born in London, despite sounding like Camden. I can tell by the accent. Very North London accent. To put it briefly, is a medical doctor who has been working out in Ukraine, providing relief to shot soldiers out there. Back in March, April, had a pretty horrific accident, which we will go into, and has been doing some fantastic rehab, and we thought, look, she's been a real inspiration to me, and I just wanted to sit down, have a chat with her, and luckily for all the listeners, well, all three of you, Scott's not even going to talk much about finance this week, or give any tips. I know. We don't want to bore anyone, but we were just speaking off air, and the main finance tip that we're going to take away is don't go to war, basically. It's really expensive. Terrible for your financial health. So that's going to be my financial tip. I'm stealing it from Jenny. That's it. We're done. The financial segment's done. So let's get into it, I think. Thanks for having me on, guys. Really appreciate it with my funny half Kiwi accent. I'm in Ukraine as a doctor. I went over as a civilian doctor, and I've ended up helping out a wee bit with the army here and there, and just anyone who's injured, really, and needs a bit of help. Obviously, it's a pretty horrific situation still. I don't know if you're seeing that on your TV screen still, or left. Do you know what? I think it's left. Yeah, which is really interesting, because it's obviously still going on, and it's still kind of in full force, but it does seem like everyone's just talking about Russell Brown these days. It's kind of moved on, which I guess it does happen, doesn't it? It's like when it's no longer front page news, which is a sad reality. Sadly, when it's not affecting a lot of us directly, the British media can preach about it for ages, but very quickly turn back off to it. Yeah. I mean, the fact is the need really hasn't gone away. If anything, it's grown since last year. One of the things we found was that the Brits are some of the most generous people, giving us medical equipment. Obviously, your government's giving us aid and weapons and everything else, which is really what we need, but ordinary people have come out with a SUV full of food or medical supplies, and normally leave us the SUV as well, which is lovely, because we always need cars. But yeah, that's still going on, but everybody is tired. I think obviously you guys are tired of it. Everyone's tired. Ukrainians are really tired of it, but what hasn't changed is people's spirit and determination to defend their homes and carry on through and win. So I guess that would be my biggest message to the British public, is the Ukrainians are not getting... I mean, everyone's tired, but nobody's about to give up. So yeah, keep the help coming. We met a little while ago, and we've been discussing how much I wanted to get you on the pod, because I think you're going to be a really interesting guest. Obviously, being a doctor A and sitting with that health profile, and also talking to somebody who's seen it all firsthand, because you never get the info firsthand. The reason we've pushed forward and got you on now is you are hoping, touch wood, to go back. Fingers crossed. Well, I've got most of my fingers. I'm missing one. Yeah, the other ones I can cross, thanks to some amazing hand therapy I've had here as well. But I'm hoping to go back and hopefully be useful. I've just been fitted with this amazing brace, and David's been rehabbing me, and sometimes I think it crushes his soul that he's stuck with it. No comment. Made some gains here and there. It wasn't very much fun for him watching you walk up the stairs for the first couple of times, eh, David? I'm not... Yeah, there's shit out of me, you feel me? I've never sweated so much. I just say, well, if I fall down, I just get back up. It'll be fine. But that didn't seem to be that reassuring, eh? No, you've got that spirit where you're like, it'll happen. What'll happen will happen. Give it a try. Why not? It probably can't be worse than what you went through. Do you want to go into... Obviously, I know all about it. Yeah, yeah, sure. Do you want to go into detail about the accident and what happened? Because I think that's pretty... Yeah, no problem. Look, so some things I can't tell you, but I'll tell you what I can. And so what happened in April was I stood on a landmine. It's a type of mine called an anti-personnel mine. They're put down all over Ukraine by Russia. The Afghans know all about it because they left, I think, 26 million landmines in Afghanistan when they were there for, I think, about seven years. So the same thing, unfortunately, is happening to Ukraine. So we really can't operate without taking that risk at times that we might stand on a landmine. And so I was working somewhere with a couple of my guys, and I took one step forward. You can't see these things. You can use some techniques to try and walk in places where they're less likely to be, but you can't actually completely reduce the risk to zero unless you don't go anywhere. That's impossible. So I took one step forward with my right foot and just felt like the next thing I knew, I was on my arse. Can I say arse on your podcast? You can say a lot worse than that. Okay. For fuck's sake. For fuck's sake, she just said arse. So the first thing I noticed was I landed on my arse. I wasn't knocked out, but obviously it really rings your bell. It's like a cock and a punch that hit. And nothing hurt, amazingly. I just sort of felt a little bit stunned, realized immediately what happened. My first thought was, well, thank goodness I didn't get blown up by one line and then fall on my back and hit another one, because that happens. Unfortunately, they cluster them together pretty tightly, and that can happen. And then of course you're there, but you can't move around. You can't even put your hands down to try and sit up, because there might be another mime there, so you have to check around yourself. And your buddies, the natural reaction is to run to you to help you. It's obviously the absolute worst thing you can do, because in doing that, they could blow themselves up, and then you've got a really serious situation. So yeah, I still had some decisions to make, so that distracted me probably from the pain. And I managed to clear the space around me, sit up, looked at my foot, saw daylight through my heel, where my heel should be. And I thought, man, this is turning into a really bad day, isn't it? That's the statement of the year, isn't it? You know, for goodness sake, what's going to happen next? Yeah, but obviously it's a pretty serious situation, and my left hand was, I think, correct me if I'm wrong, David, but the correct medical term is like fairly munted. Yes, that's what will have been written in your notes. Fairly munted. No, so I still had my left index finger on, but the knuckle was completely destroyed, so it wasn't useful. There wasn't a great deal of bleeding from my foot, but because of the explosion, and an explosion cauterises the ends of blood vessels, so it lessens the bleeding, which is one less problem to deal with, you know, in the field of problems you've got out there. And then the sort of, the little finger side of my left hand was quite fairly blown up as well. I lost a bit of bone from there and quite a bit of skin, and my, you've seen the photos, my friends call it the lizard hand, very kindly and lovingly, the lizard hand. So, yeah, so all of that happened, and then of course the next thing is, wherever we were was a bad place to be, so we had to get out, which involved quite a lot of crawling, which wasn't very pleasant, but we got there, and despite the odds, we managed to all get out, and then that started this journey that will be familiar to, you know, although it was a fairly dramatic injury, but to any of you who've had any kind of injury of, oh, okay, well this is my new reality. I start this journey, where we're going, I don't know, but everything, all the priorities I had before that day, you think about things that are important to you, suddenly fall by the wayside, and once you're out and you're safe, and your guys, like your team are safe, the next thing is, okay, well all I have to do now is just get better. Simple, simple, right? Simple shit. Yeah, so was it just you and your team that stepped on one, or was it multiple people? It was just me that day, yeah, but there have been other, you know, there's been other guys around and about, you know, close friends. It's not an unusual thing, it's not an unusual thing. We don't, obviously you'll know from the press, we never release any numbers or anything like that, but it's a fairly common problem, unfortunately. I mean, the feeling of going to work, having the risk of, and you full well know that there's a possibility you're going to step on a landmine. How do you, like, do you even think about that? Like when you wake up in the morning and it's like, right, off to work. Yeah. How does that sit with you? It's an interesting question, because Dave and I were just having a conversation about how the vast majority of normal people, you know, their number one concern is safety in all aspects of their life, but it really limits you in so many things. I guess what you would talk about is in the financial sphere, where if you just go safety, safety, safety, and I don't know, I don't know anything about money, I just went to war, it's really expensive. But, you know, if you're 19 years old and you put all of your money in the most conservative kind of low-earning fund there is, then maybe that's not the best thing. I don't know, you tell me, but safety can sometimes be your worst enemy. So you've got to consider the risks, but at the same time, if you truly woke up every morning and thought, today my foot might get almost blown off, it's going to hurt like hell, it's going to put my friends in danger helping me, you'd never go anywhere or do anything. That's a really good point, because I think that's in, I think you can compare it, even though it's a completely bizarre situation, you can almost compare it to most walks of life, what you said there about, we've got to have a fine balance, and it's the same for you, but a fine balance between having an awareness of the worst case scenario in any given moment, but obviously if you focus all your attention on the really unlikely shit, then you've got no attention or resources for what's going on. Yeah, absolutely, and you can get paralysed by fear. In some ways, I mean, somebody's changed career before, and in some ways you can easily get that when you're stuck in a rut and you really need a change of career, but you're afraid of what the consequences might be if you get it wrong. Obviously, using example of war is the extreme end of that in some ways, but I think the central message is you can't allow fear to rule your life, and if it does, you're not going to get very far. But yeah, so did I wake up every morning and think about that? No, but I think it's always in the back of your mind, and I was very aware that I'd been in Ukraine for maybe about a year by that point. I wasn't there right after the main invasion in February, but I arrived a little after that, and you sort of end up thinking, I've been here for a year and nothing that terrible's happened, and I've watched really bad things happen to really good people who are probably much better than I am at what they do, and some of it is just luck, and I guess it's how you deal with that and how you rationalise it. But it's obviously quite a high-paced kind of... I mean, it's boring. Soldiering is 98% or 95% total and utter boredom, and then 5% sheer terror. I mean, compared to that, when you go, I've had, what, nine surgeries, so I guess I skipped a bit of the story because I ended up, very thankfully, I ended up in London through various means, which I won't go into, but the amazing plastic surgeons here who fixed me up, and orthopaedic surgeons, and shout out to the amazing physios, and hand therapists. They're studying the carpet right now. No, no, thanks, mate. You know, so it sort of started this journey where I've had, you know, nine surgeries, and rehab is kind of 100% total boredom, I would say, mainly. 100%? There's been some good chatting there, hasn't there? Give me 2%. I'll give you 2%. There's been some great... It's good playlist sharing. Yeah. Good playlist sharing. Yeah. I've learned about New Zealand music a little bit. Yeah. What's your favourite New Zealand artist, do you reckon? Um, I like the Fat Freddy's Drop. Fat Freddy's Drop. You introduced me to it. Yeah, we've done it. I've basically been tortured to the sound of Fat Freddy's Drop. You know it's going to be a really hard session when that playlist goes on. I feel like I need to hear Fat Freddy's after this because it could become our new show of music. Yeah, exit music, you know, something like that. We'll get it on the Kintet, yeah. We have had some good times, but I think psychologically, you know, going through that journey of how to fix yourself, and particularly for me, patience as well. So frustrating, you know, when you can't even sit up, you want to run. I remember when I was first in bed, like after the first operation, and before they'd done the definitive surgery to pin all the bones together, and then they took a piece of my right thigh and they put it in, basically, it looks like a miniature bum. You've got quite a cute name for your foot, should we say, a nickname? Oh, Frankenfoot, or the Frankenheel, yeah. It's had a bit of a chop-chop job done on it, and it does look like a little buttock, and it grows hairs. I now grow hairs on my heel. It's quite freaky. Scott's looking like he wants to see it, no? I don't know if I do. But I think you will have to, maybe. Show and tell, I'm going to show you later, you know. Yeah, yeah, we will spare you guys the before photos. I guess you probably will get banned from Spotify if we put those up, but yeah. You had no trouble dropping them into my inbox before we had them up there. By the way, this is what you're getting yourself into, have a foot in essentially two halves. But no, obviously, it's taken a while, and it's been a journey, and they've done some really cool creative things, and of course, you're supposed to be really grateful every minute of every day, but that's not how humans work, is it? You know, that's just like, sometimes you're fed up and frustrated, and you feel sorry for yourself, and it's like, that's the human condition as well. You say that, but I feel like you kind of ooze this positive energy just from the moment I met you earlier, and just the way you speak about everything. It seems like your mindset is very much, I'm going to get back, no matter what. Obviously, you're going to have your up and down periods, but is that just you, or is this something you've learned over time? Where does that come from? I'm not really sure. I think when something happens like this, even though it's a bad thing, and if you could turn the clock back, you know, I'm not sure I believe these people who say, oh, if I could turn the clock back, I'd do it exactly the same again. I'd be like, no, I would have stepped, you know, five inches to my right and not blown my foot off, thanks very much. I'm not going to lie, but, and of course, you know, disclaimer to everyone out there, everybody's experience is different, and I completely appreciate that for some people, they don't feel that way, and for some people, a catastrophic injury has turned their life around and made them think differently about the world, and I don't feel like I've had that sort of epiphany, but it does teach some things, and for me as a doctor, like as a health professional, to become a patient, like become, you know, the most immobile, dependent patient, short of being paralysed, you know, I mean, once they do this operation to put, it's called a free flap, where they've taken that massive chunk of my thigh, slotted into my heel to remake that soft tissue, and it's then all about keeping that area, it's a sacrosanct thing, you know, so they come in every hour and they check the baby's heartbeat with an ultrasound, like is it still alive, you know, they made a frame that they pinned through my tibia, through my shinbone, just so my heel wouldn't touch the beard, because I can't feel that area either, so it's all about taking care of that sort of precious piece of skin then, which makes life really boring, you're really immobile, they wouldn't let me out of bed for the, not even swing my leg over the side of the bed for five days after they've done the definitive operation, and that was, you know, as a 40-year-old woman who's fit and well and healthy, to go from running around a muddy field and helping people, to lying in a bed, having another woman toilet you, you know, like I actually can't take a shit without calling for help. Seek professional help. That's a good way to end that whole thing. No, Scott, I think, I think Scott's actually really picked up on something there. I probably forget it a little bit, because I know you pretty well now, and the, I guess the impact of your personality is less now to me, because it's like, oh, it's just Jenny, but... She's just mad. She's just nuts, yeah. No, the people around this Until Gym that we work out of, and, you know, different personal trainers, different people that see you, you know, and know that I'm working with you, and you've got another physio who we definitely should shout out in Lucy, who's doing your hand stuff. I'm focusing on the foot. She's done an unbelievable job, but between, you know, between the two of us, we kind of worked in different, different areas, but every person that comes into contact with you notices that positivity, that, you know, you know, what, it would be very easy to go, woe is me, life is rubbish. What strategies, and you might not have any, and it might just be in built, but do you have any strategies that over the last six months, or, you know, how many other months it's been, you've employed? Can I? Okay, sorry, I just... Whenever. We can always touch it. Yeah, no, cool. It's a great question, and I think the key, and I think this is probably so personal as well, each individual person would be very different, but the key for me has been to be, I wouldn't say happy with my situation, but get comfortable with it and just accept that this is my reality. There's always an, there was always opportunity in everything, so I reckon I must have read more books over the last four or five months than I've ever read in my life, maybe even at medical school, but, you know, probably shouldn't admit that, should I, but... What's been the favourite? That's a good question. Oh, yes, so the favourite is probably the one I was just discussing with you, actually, David, that I'm reading at the moment, which is, we get this right, The Men, The Mission, and Me by an ex-Delta Force commander, Peter Blaber, I think. Is it a biography? Yeah, it is a biography, but it's almost a, I wouldn't say it's a self-help book, but it's just a way of approaching life. It's quite interesting, you know, just some interesting approaches to, you know, his theory is if you have your pattern recognition dialed in, you can be a lot more successful at whatever you're trying to do in life. You sort of, oh, yep, yep, well, I've never been in this exact scenario, but this, this, and this relate to it, and, of course, the field that we both work in in medicine is exactly that. You do a lot of pattern recognition, even though we pretend we're diagnostic ninjas who keep, you know, encyclopedias in our heads, but it doesn't work like that in real life all the time, at least not for me. I think, sorry, I've got to end where you're about to go, I think, but you actually saw me for your knee a little, a few weeks back, and you can get that thing of people being like, oh, you're magic, but it all, again, comes from pattern recognition of like, they've got pain here, they're probably weak here, they're probably tight here, and some patients are like, how did you know I was going to be, and then you're like, oh, do you wear these shoes a lot, are they worn here, and they're like, like, you're some kind of magic psychic, but, yeah, pattern recognition, I guess, comes up everywhere, probably in finance as well, though. Yeah, yeah, no, I think it's, as you were saying there, you kind of almost, in your head, have a mental model of like, go there, and it's like a tree of, it's almost a decision tree, it's like, that's a yes, we'll go that way, no, you go, and you finally get around to the kind of the way, the place where you want to be, but yeah, I guess it's a good mental model to have for daily life. Yeah, and I think it's really different to a protocol, and I think protocols have their place, you know, protocols and checklists, but in, you know, what you're describing, decision tree is a lot more cognitively involved, I think, sort of, you know, you've got a lot more options, so, yeah, fascinating, because pattern recognition works really well on the battlefield, it works really well in combat medicine, it works really well in civilian medicine, so I'm kind of, I suppose I'm reading a book about something I already thought was a thing, so maybe that's not the best example to pick, but it's well written, and it's interesting, and I think, but yeah, you know, I've never read that much before, but when all you can do is lie on your back for weeks on end, it really is, you know, some days I was too exhausted to read, it's just, nobody tells you this when you get hurt in some sort of bigger trauma, well, even, even something small, you know, and sort of fall over and break your wrist or whatever, you know, it's, there are different types of risk factors, we're not going to go there, but some of them are really horrific, so I'm not minimising anyone's broken wrist, but it doesn't matter what insult the body has, it takes a lot more energy, it takes feeding, it takes watering, and it takes wristing, you know, to start getting over that before you can get anywhere near some stimulation, and so the rehab stuff, but I don't know, maybe you'd disagree with that, Dave, but I just felt like the money shot for me was in wristing and recuperating a lot initially. Massively overlooked in rehab, obviously, I work, not exclusively, but a lot of my work is with either quite high-achieving individuals or sports people who are generally pretty intrinsically motivated, and actually, you've got to read the, you've completely got to read the patient, you know, I've worked in the NHS potentially with some people who are less intrinsically motivated, so it's a complete scale, exactly, rehab can't have a protocol because it's got to fit, almost like that decision tree, how does this person respond to x thing, let's go this way, how does this person respond to y thing, and with people that are highly motivated, you definitely fall into that camp, you know, anybody who's got a medical degree has had to push themselves pretty hard, anyone who's got into, out of choice to go and be on the front line working in Ukraine, there's got to be a pretty special person mentally. You're a prime example, and other people I work with are prime examples of, no, more is not always more. Actually, you can't spend 19 hours a day doing rehab and thinking that you're going to get better quickly by doing that, you've got to go, I've kind of reached my ceiling of how much I can do today, now I've got to rest and let my body do its thing to repair, and then I can go again on another day, rather than exhausting myself fully, and pretty recently, like within the last couple of weeks, oh I know what you're going to bring up now, and I'm not going to, I'm going to take no blame for this because it was while I was away on holiday, but you've probably pushed yourself too hard and have ended up taking a backward step in your rehab a little bit. Yeah, for sure, and I think, you know, initially once you have all the surgeries and the operations, and they say to you, you know, rehab isn't a flat progression, you know, a sort of a linear progression, sorry, if it's a flat progression, it's really bad, no progression, but it's not a linear progression, it's, you know, you have plateaus, and you have peaks and troughs even, and things get worse before they get better again, and sometimes it does feel like you're just getting worse and worse and worse before you hit a real sort of growth peak again, but yeah, you can definitely push yourself too much, and I think the, you know, the good adaptations is exactly the same as building muscles in the gym, right, so when you, you know, you don't build muscle when you're doing your bicep curls, it's when you are eating protein and resting after your gym sessions that you build, and I would know a lot about big biceps, so. You're just jealous, Dave. Yeah, sorry, I couldn't help. And everyone's jealous of the Franken heel, you know, yeah, yeah, you know, it looks like a little bicep on the back of my foot, it's the weirdest little thing, but I've still got a foot, so I'm grateful for that, but no, so I reckon to go right the way back to our original question, I think it's been, I've managed to keep a fairly sunny disposition on most days, just because I can understand that I have to learn patience, this is my new reality, live with it, look for the good in it, look for all the good stuff, you know, read some books, I have more time for my friends, I can, you know, even certain things, I've been working with a really good personal trainer as well, shout out to James, when I first went to see him, I did email him and I said, look, I know you've said you've got an interest in injury rehab and you're up for this and everything else, but when I walk or rather kind of crab crawl shuffle through the gym doors, please don't be put off, give it a go, give it one session, because at the time, I called myself the broken crab, because I could only move from station to station in the gym by doing some sort of bum crawling crab thing, you know, with one good hand and one crook hand, like a little broken crab claw and, you know, he sort of stuck with it and helped me out with that, but, and even, you know, doing things like that where you think, I know I can't push myself too much, but there really are very few people who cannot get in the gym and do something, you know, you might need guidance from somebody who knows a lot more than you, but at least you can do something and for me, I really enjoyed, it could have gone one of two ways, I could have seen the guy who's sort of benching the same amount I could bench before and I could have been really gutted and sort of wanted to leave in floods of tears, but actually being in that environment where people are pushing themselves and it's sports and, you know, everyone's healthy and having a good laugh and I just, it really motivated me. Would you say that you're almost enjoying the process as best as you can, like it's, you kind of see where you want to get to, where you are, it's almost just like, let's just do it and enjoy it whilst you do it? Yeah, yeah, I reckon, I reckon, like one of the things I worked on in the gym with James is, I reckon that, you know, before I lost like, it was like literally all my muscle mass and got a bit fat sitting in, sitting in bed for two months, I was quite like tight and quite restricted in some of my movements, you know, particularly with my shoulders and my lower back and by losing a lot of muscle that was stiffening all of that stuff up, I actually become more flexible, probably for the first time since my teenage years, they're like, oh, all of a sudden I can move a lot better and then there's this challenge of, okay, so you can start to try and rebuild my body but not lose that flexibility, like for the first time in my life, actually learn some good form and do things properly. You can see you have the yoga. Yeah, you know, and I think, I think there are opportunities, there are opportunities in everything, you just have to look for them and some days I cannot see them at all and I feel sorry for myself and I want to lock the world away and fuck everything and everybody and just leave me alone and that's okay too, you have to have those days. 100%, that's just being human isn't it, I think. Yep, but you know, I think overall the thing that motivates me more than anything else is to get back to Ukraine because there's so much work that has to be done there, you know, my friends are still there, they're all still in harm's way, you know, with whatever job and role they do, you know, with the civilians, military, like nowhere really is truly safe and no job is truly safe there, so the motivation to get back there has really helped me as well, having that bigger goal. Where did your motivation first come from? I don't know if you can speak about it, but just like, it's not every person will wake up one day and say, right, I'm a doctor, I can give something, I'm just going to go, was it quite a snap decision or did it take a bit of kind of thinking about, how did that come about for you personally? That's an interesting question because I think it didn't take that much thinking about, but it did take a bit of planning because I was living a pretty charmed life as a locum, doing my thing. It sounds like you had the best life, floating around in boats. Yeah, that's right, yeah, boats and mountains and, you know, having a real good time and it was wonderful and I enjoyed my role as the doctor who let other doctors go on holiday, which is the way I put it, you know, everyone's like, oh locum, you're just after the money, but actually it's not really any better when you take into account your expenses and tax and all of that sort of crap. It's about roughly equivalent, but I just liked being the doctor that could go there for two weeks and, you know, give someone some time off and say good day to everyone and, you know, before I got grumpy mean Jenny out, you know, I'd be gone. So everybody liked you and it was a great, great time, but there was one particular day and I was on a plane taking off going to work for another different hospital and I looked down and saw my little floating home and it just looked perfect and the beautiful sunshine and I'd been thinking about going to Ukraine and I'd been slowly sort of sorting my things out. It was about, I guess, about a month and a half after the full-scale invasion at that stage and then I read an email, somebody said that the Ukrainian Ministry of Health was looking for doctors to volunteer, foreign doctors and that they'd register us or whatever else and I just thought, no, this life's a little bit too good, isn't it? You know, you gotta, come on Jen, you gotta go work at something sometime, like go out and do something useful. So I sort of wound things up and went out to Ukraine, spent about a week looking for work as a, not looking for work, but just waiting for the Ministry of Health to get in touch with me as a civilian doctor and then they sort of said to me, well actually, are you going to help out a little bit more on the front lines? Okay, that's fine. So I went and did that. So I guess that's how it started and of course everyone asks that question and it's a very good and relevant question, but the thing for me is what keeps you there when you, you know, once you get going. You need to go back after your foot's been nearly blown up. Yeah, absolutely right. One of the things I live in fear of is, you know, you've done all this work, Lucy, all of our hands have done all of her work, you know, Mr H, the plastic surgeon, done all of his work, like, well, I don't want to go and get it blown up, it'd be so embarrassing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I, you know, of course, I hope I'm not too scared when I get back out there, but you never quite know, you know, maybe this has made me petrified and I can't operate anymore, you know. That was a question I was going to ask, actually, just, you know, but you're not going to know, but, you know, are you going to be, we talked about this, I don't know, 20 minutes ago, didn't we, but that thing about fear and not being obsessed by fear and you weren't initially obsessed, you know, you knew landmines were a possibility, but they weren't a reality for you. Yep, yep. And now, you know, devil's advocate with the question, I'm trying to scare the shit out of you, but, you know, it's going to play a bigger role in your brain, surely. Yeah, for sure, I think so. I think, you know, it's interesting, society always tells you that, you know, society's full of myths about getting older, I reckon, and one of the things they always tell you is as you get older, you get more fearful of things, less willing to take risks, you know, that's the societal narrative, and I really haven't found that. I've found that for me, you know, you become more comfortable in your own skin, more comfortable with your body, so you know how, say, in the context of sport, how your body reacts to certain stimuli or movement or whatever, and then you could go try something new, and I've actually found as I've got older, it's become a little easier to learn new things, because I know where my body is in space a lot better than I did when I was 19, say, and I think, you know, for me, am I more or less scared now than I would have been if I was 19? I mean, who knows, you can't really answer that, but I think the way the individual deals with fear is so different to each individual. I mean, if you take my example, I don't have any living parents, and I don't have a spouse, and I don't have kids, and I think that massively takes away a big headache for me deciding whether this is okay or that is okay, because I'm a really selfish gen. I only have to consider myself, so, you know, that plays into fear as well, and I don't know. People simplify it, and they say, well, after you've had a terrible thing like this happen, you'll either be a lot more frightened, or you'll just go, fuck it, I don't care, but I don't know. I think it's more complex than that, and I'll just see how I go, and often in life, you can't really tell unless you leap. Just go give it a go and see what happens. Just don't you dare undo my hard work. It would be really embarrassing. So embarrassing. You would never forgive me, even more so than the coffee incident. Yeah, we were talking earlier about Jenny pouring the coffee down me, but I'm over it, as you can hear. There is no bitterness there. Zero. So I guess I still haven't answered your question, but anyway, in a very roundabout way, what I would say is the thing that keeps me there is the guy to my left and the guy to my right, and that's your friends who are there doing the job with you and supporting you, and that also takes away a bit of the fear, because you're so worried about your mates, you don't think too much about yourself. I think that's how that works. It's simple, in a way. Shall we get into a bit on the injury side? So I've got a question. I always try and put myself into your shoes. That wasn't meant to be a pun. Jenny's got this new brace on. Just a disclaimer here. My shoes are probably the weirdest pair of shoes in Great Britain right now, but I've got a size 38.5. I don't get UK sizes. I'll do Euro. Sorry, guys. I don't know what that means. 38.5 on my left foot and a size 46 on my right foot. I told you the Franken heel was a bit weird. Yeah. So I always try and put myself into your shoes, and one of them always keeps falling off. Get out. Let me start again. Cut. As a medical professional who's undergone a lot of rehab and treatment and stuff and been in hospital and had operations that obviously you would have never had before, do you think this experience will make you a better doctor and a better clinician? Yeah, 100%. I think there's no way, unless you're made of stone, there's no way it can make you a better doctor and a better clinician. Yeah. I don't know the right word, really, but it's pretty humbling to end up, as I say, as the 40-year-old independent woman who all of a sudden cannot take a shit on her own without pressing the call bell for someone she maybe has never even met. Shout out to those amazing people in hospital who do that job. The healthcare assistants and the nurses are just amazing. But yeah, going through that process and the frustrations that come with it, even when the standard of care ... The standard of care I've received here has been exceptionally high, but it doesn't mean there are not frustrations, and it doesn't mean there are not people who are amazing clinicians, really well-intentioned, who come in, move your bedside table away so they and the team can speak to you, and then don't put it back. And you know it's Saturday night, and the nurses are so busy, and you don't want to ring your bell to ask for your bedside table. And it's so near, yet so far. You pour coffee on them. You pour coffee on them. I only learned that trick after discharge day, thanks for the teaching, if only I'd known. But yeah, so things like that, and I instantly thought of all of the times that I've done that to some poor patient who can't reach their bedside table, or their walker, or their ... Or I'd be ... Sometimes I'd be on the phone to one of my very dear friends in Ukraine, and they were on the front line, and tomorrow, who knows, maybe I'd be able to speak to them. Maybe they wouldn't be there. That's the reality of any war, but of this war, it's obviously horrific. And I'd be on the phone to a very dear friend, and there'd be someone who'd be standing there with that facial expression that just says, I'm the clinician. I'm so much more important than whoever you're on the phone to. So put the fucking phone down and speak with me now, patient. Of course they didn't think that. They were all a lot kinder and more considerate than that, but you do feel a little bit like that. And there were certainly times when I walked into somebody's room with that attitude, and I have no idea who they were talking on the phone to. They could have been saying goodbye to their aunt who was on her last legs somewhere else, and there's me barging in, interrupting to tell them the results of their X-ray, or whatever else. But I think in general in healthcare, we see our time as just so important, and we minimise the importance of the patient's time. And to my utter horror, because I always thought I was a bit better than that, being a patient with a pretty serious injury really made me realise that actually I'm not that good, and I need to do better. Something I learnt really early on as a physio on the wards, I don't do a lot of ward stuff now, but a really quick one, I learnt the first few weeks that even though I wasn't at the time knowledgeable really, I'd got my degree, but didn't really know a lot compared to most of the clinicians around. Every time I finished seeing a patient, offer to go and make them a cup of tea, and go, I'm willing to do that for you, I'll make you a cup of tea, and they end up thinking you're a better physio, or whatever, than the doctors who are super knowledgeable. And they're like, oh it's you, you're amazing, and I'm like, oh, I don't really know what I'm doing from a clinical point of view, but I'm willing to make you a cup of tea. 100%. So it's the little things. The little things. It really is, it makes a massive difference, and the more incapacitated you are, the less independent you are, the more those little things make a massive difference. Incidentally, everyone was amazing at the big London hospital I was treated at, but my favourite person was the inpatient physio. She was amazing. She was just the person who knew exactly what I needed all the time, knew when I needed space, knew when I needed pushing versus when she needed to back off. She was actually a very experienced physio, but yeah, just that human touch. She was the only person who came round where I was never, other than the lead consultant, the only people who came round to my bedside where it didn't matter how grumpy I was, what time of day, what was going on, how much pain I was in, I was just really grateful to see them. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I think knowing where I went wrong for all of my career to date, no, it's not quite like that, but you definitely, you cannot put yourself in the shoes of a patient with major trauma or a major illness unless you've actually had it. I'm convinced of that, really. You can learn lessons, for sure, but for me, anyway, I wasn't perceptive enough ever to really pick up those things until it was me. And now you can truly empathise with how it feels, you've lived that, and yeah. Yeah, yeah, definitely. To a certain extent, with the caveat that everybody's experience is slightly different and it's no good me bouncing into someone's room trying to sort of G them up and crack the jokes that made me laugh when I couldn't toilet myself or reach my water on the bedside table. Somebody else could easily be like, get the hell out of my face. I do not want that approach. Yeah, yeah. And I think, I don't know about you, David, but that's what keeps me going in the health profession because everybody is so different. It's not disease, it's not what people think when they're in school. I never wanted to be a doctor in school, but when people are in school wanting to be a doctor, they're like, the body is fascinating. Disease is fascinating. I want this career that makes me think. When did you decide you wanted to be a doctor out of interest? Yeah, that's kind of an interesting question because it's really not a very typical story, but I was in, I'd moved, so I spent half my life in the UK, half my life in New Zealand. Despite the accent. New Zealand on a total win. Yeah, it's sad because in New Zealand, they think I'm British, Pommie, and in Britain, they think I'm Kiwi or Aussie, so I can't win really, truly. And in Ukraine, they definitely know I can't speak Ukrainian very well at all, but I'm trying. Maybe the next time we meet, you'll have got a Ukrainian accent. Yeah, so I guess it was, so I actually retrained, I did something in the military for a few years, and then I retrained as a bicycle mechanic, because I was really enjoying my cycling. The typical things people do when they come out of the military, you know, do security work, set up their own business, contracting or whatever. I just really liked mountain biking in particular, a little bit of road cycling, but you know, skinny tyres, not really my thing, and the Lycra, definitely not really my thing. But I was big into mountain biking, just really loved bikes, always loved bikes. Sport's been a huge part of my life, you know, my whole life. Probably the biggest challenge of being injured, doesn't come as any surprise to anyone, is that, you know, that aspect of missing out on sport, and just moving, just physical activity. But anyway, love mountain biking, so I decided, right, I'm going to be a bicycle mechanic for the rest of my life, that's what I'm going to do, so I did a training course. I ended up moving to New Zealand on a whim, that's a whole other massive story, let's not go there, but ended up in New Zealand. New Zealand, really super cool country, it very much is who you know in many ways still, and it certainly was back then, you know, quite a few years ago. So I really struggled to get a job initially as a bike mechanic, and I started working in a, I worked in a factory bagging lollies, sweets is the English word, bagging sweets. Yep, really cerebral work, I remember we were not allowed to talk on the production line, but we could eat as much as we wanted, and I remember, pretty quickly, yeah, I do remember the manager, she rationalised this by saying, look, we don't like theft, we don't like thieves, if we let you eat your fucking fill of sugary shit all day, you won't steal a bag of it and take it home. I was like, right, okay, that's fine. So, really liked the jet planes, that was my favourite, jet planes and jelly beans. If I ever get a listening of weird and wonderful counsellors, it'll probably be from those six months. But anyway, I was on a zero hours contract, earning minimum wage, as a recent immigrant, bagging lollies on a production line, and other than my colleagues, who were pretty cool people, it was fairly miserable. And I think, I did a few months of that, and I just thought, Jen, like, what are you doing? Like, what, what is this? You've gone from a successful career that you've thrown the towel into, you know, the zero hours miserable contract. But free sweets, that's not, that's not, that's not jelly beans. No, there was even some of that good, you know, that chocolate that's never actually seen a cocoa bean in its life? That kind of chocolate, it's the best kind. The stuff that Easter eggs are made of. Yeah, there was that too. But no, one day I just thought, you know, what are you doing? I'd done kind of okay at school until I was about 16, 17, until I could drive. Does that sound familiar? And then all of a sudden you go, you know, you went away and did some other cooler things and some sport and some flying and other bits and bobs. And then I guess I'd always wondered if I could do good at academic stuff. That sounds intelligent, doesn't it? 100% no. It's taken me maybe 16 years to find out, but the answer was definitely no. Yeah, so I thought, oh, maybe I could go to university. And I was reading, I can't believe I'm admitting this to the world on a podcast. I really hope it is only you. You're really overselling this across the world. You might hit four of our mates and our mums. Yeah, where's your mum this week? She might be on the other side of the world, in which case. Yeah, so I was reading this trashy novel. I don't like fiction. I was reading this trashy novel about a GP who hated her life and had just got divorced. And there was something in there that made me think, I wonder if I could be a doctor. It's too bizarre, isn't it? But honestly, it's completely true. And I ended up getting into Auckland Medical School. Thank you very much. I'm learning. I love the way you make decisions. It seems so almost flippant, but it works out really well. It just works out. I don't know, would it work out in the financial markets though, Scott? That's the thing. I mean, a lot of people got rich on luck, so probably. The older days, it's better to be lucky than good. Exactly. Yeah. So you read a trashy book about another doctor. That's really embarrassing. I'm admitting this to whoever's listening, but it's completely true. I ended up in, shout out to Auckland Medical School. Thank you very much for letting me in. But no, look, with every year, I just realised how lucky I was to effectively trip over and fall on my face into medicine because it just got richer and richer and gave back more and more and sort of more interesting, intriguing career. Probably a couple of times I've almost left just because sometimes you get a bit bored. The world's a big place, isn't it? And there's lots of stuff to do. It's all a bit fascinating. One year, I decided I wanted to race bikes. So I went and did that, but it was pretty rubbish. It was really good fun though. And eventually- Bicycles or motorbikes? No, no, no. Bicycles. Yeah. And eventually, the dean wrote to me and said, look, you're just about smart enough to take one year off, but you're not smart enough to take two years off. So come on back or bugger off. But I'm glad I saw it through. I now work predominantly in rural hospitals. So sort of true generalism really. Do a little bit of everything. Jack of all trades, master of nothing. But there's always phone a friend with some amazing specialists. Excuse me, who we can phone up and ask for advice. And it's a wonderful community of colleagues, and it's very, very rewarding to serve these communities that are really in the back of beyond sometimes. Difficult access to bigger hospitals and all the medical treatment you might need there if you get involved in some terrible trauma on your farm or whatever. But often we can send an air ambulance, and they maybe bypass the little hospital I would work in. But sometimes the place is flooded, the roads close, helicopter can't fly, and it becomes really difficult. You end up with some quite challenging cases on your doorstep that nobody would think of that a rural hospital has to deal with. I don't think you guys really have anything like that over here except maybe in the, I don't know, west coast of Scotland, out of Hebrides or something like that. Certainly not in central London. So you do that all over the world basically? Just New Zealand. So although I did sort of sign up to go practice in Ukraine, I actually haven't really worked as a doctor there because I haven't needed to. Trauma is really quite simple. Horrific, horrible, but simple and formulaic, especially when you're at the sharp pointy end and you don't have a lot of resources. Typical approach is make sure they don't bleed to death, first of all. Anyone who's done a basic first aid course will know in the civilian world, apart from checking for danger, you're doctor ABC, you check for airway first, and then breathing, and then circulation. And on the battlefield and trauma context, we do things a little bit differently. We use an acronym called MARCH, and the first thing is M for Massive Haemorrhage, because that's what's going to, haemorrhage is bleeding, right? So that's what's going to kill you. Quite nice that the letter is for massive, and then the actual importance is it hasn't got a letter. Massive, massive. Anyone else finish that? Yeah, okay. Sorry, go on. You're absolutely right, and this is one reason why I hate acronyms in medicine, because they're often complete nonsense. I actually preferred it when we just did eponymous names for things, you know, random disease names made a lot more sense than trying to fit it into, you know, shoehorn it into an acronym. Shoehorns are an interesting thing. Here's the thing I learned today. So I went to this marvellous place, the people who made my brace, shout out to orthopedics. I've had a lot of people do a lot of things for me. But the people who made this brace, I went there, and it does fit into this enormous shoe, but you can't really get into the shoe without a shoehorn. Shoehorns in Ukraine, ubiquitous. You can't rent an apartment without someone throwing in a shoehorn. That is interesting. Yeah, you get round someone's house and they don't have a shoehorn, and it's like not having curtains, or not having a sink. Where's your shoehorn? Britain? Not so easy. Never owned a shoehorn. Do you have a shoehorn, Scott? No. Super long ones as well. Yeah, that's right. When you get a super long shoehorn. Yeah, it was so weird seeing my Ukrainian friends, obviously not in the front line, we don't worry about shoehorns in the trenches. But anyway, you know, you sort of go back to Kyiv or Lviv and see your friends and they've got, you know, they're young, fit, healthy people, but instead of bending over to put their shoe on, they've got this massive shoehorn. It's like about three and a half feet long. Cultural differences, eh? Yeah. This segment is going to get cut. Yeah, definitely. Should we go back to the shoehorn segment? Yeah, let's get rid of that. Let's not do that. This episode will be called all about shoehorns. Let's try and find some normality. Some normality again. Yeah. So going back to your injury. Yes. I am very interested. How do you, and I guess Dave's going to chime in here. How do you go from start to where you are in terms of like the whole physio process from having a hole in your heel, as you said? What do you do? What's the process behind that? Because it must be a very kind of baby steps, just lots of baby steps. That's what I can kind of imagine. But I'm interested to hear the process you went through, I guess. Yeah, it really is baby steps. And I knew it would be like that at the beginning. It's kind of logical and everyone tells you that, but I didn't realise quite how baby the baby steps are. It's like, you know, baby cockroach steps, not baby human steps. Just tiny little jumps. And I guess the first thing, so it hasn't been until recently that I could even stand on the bad leg. So the first thing I ended up doing once they released me from sort of absolute bedrest was getting really good at balancing on my other leg to sort of reach things and hop around and move. And it's all about finding ways to adapt what you would normally do in normal life to, okay, so now, like at that stage, I can use my left hand. So I just have my left leg and my right hand to use. And you sort of do as much as you can and change the way you do things. But I think, again, patience is the key thing. And it's just understanding that it's not even incremental gains, because a lot of days it's losses, right? You know, you win some, you lose some peaks and troughs of healing and progression. And just being patient when you're actually going backwards is just the normal part of healing. You know, it's not a linear progression, you know, in the same way that the Ukrainian counter-offensive that you guys would hear about on TV, you know, it's not Call of Duty on some, you know, games console. It's like, okay, you know, you're going to have good days and bad days. Some days you go forward, some days you get pushed back a little bit. And I would say, you know, it's more or less the process. Yeah, learning to use my hand again and try and grip things and move my fingers. And that was a really slow process. And you see it's still ongoing. I can't really make a fist yet. Learning not to point with my left index finger that's not there anymore. And like, yeah, just getting used to new reality really slowly. I think, as you said, I'm definitely going to chime in. And I think, and you've touched on it there, but what I always try and do with patience is that thing of setting really small goals, which, you know, if you go almost like a binary, I can or I can't, can I walk on my bad foot? No, that's failure. Yeah. So, you know, if you compare yourself to where you were, am I there? No. So this last three months has been completely wasted kind of thing. If you look at it in that way, and it just has to be little small, ideally slightly measurable things, whether that's this, you know, let's talk about how happy you were in the first session or two with the big toe in terms of, you know. Yeah. I mean, yeah, first session or two and I was trying to, you know, move my ankle, move my toe, and the toe was like just a lump of stone, wouldn't move up or down, really. It felt like we would never, ever get anywhere, ever. And then you just chip away slowly, slowly. You know, I think the key thing is your goals have to be achievable, not necessarily achievable today. Maybe that's too easy, but you've got to be able to look at a realistic timeframe and sort of, you've got to have those long-term goals. Yeah, I want to be able to walk on both legs again, preferably normally, preferably with no brace and no support of any kind, no crutches. That may or may not happen. Either way, it's way in the future that I can evaluate that. Yes, it's specific. Yes, it's measurable, but the timeframe almost doesn't exist when you're really just living day to day, you know, particularly if you're in a lot of pain. So you've also got to have those really short-term goals of like, okay, they've left my meal tray over the far side of the room again, but now I know I can get there on one leg carefully, balance and pull it back. You know, great. That's a first. I've never done that before, you know, or say with the big toe thing, you know, to just get it moving five or 10 degrees, which is not nearly enough to walk normally, but it's a start. But it was that functional thing of you couldn't, someone who doesn't, isn't medical wouldn't, you know, know necessarily what this means, but toe touch weight there with your crutches, you couldn't, your toe was so stiff that you couldn't even put the toe, bottom of the toe on the floor really. Yeah, yeah. And then after a few sessions, you know, we've got that now. Yeah. Yeah. And you almost have to remind yourself, I think, I think if you generally look at things with a positive mindset, the flip side to that is you forget so quickly where you were. I think maybe the more negative sort of people would easily remember just how hard it was last week, but I just didn't really, didn't really think about that. I just thought, oh yeah, sure. I've been able to bend my toe like this for, oh no, wait, I haven't actually. Actually, it's a really hard fought win. And you forget just how bad things were and how far you've come. No, thank you. Got to remember that. Otherwise you don't feel like you're going forward. Out of interest. Do you have a, like a notebook or maybe something digital where you almost note down exactly the small, like daily things that you do. So you can look back and remember, like, oh, two weeks ago, I actually couldn't bend my toe X amount or something to help you remember like how far you have come. Because like, yeah, I saw you walking down and I haven't seen anything before. So from my point of view, it's amazing. I know it's been a massive journey to get there. And you just saying like, yeah, it's easy to forget is quite interesting. Yeah, I think I've always been really lazy about journaling. You know, they say you're supposed to journal the sign of intelligence or whatever, but it's never really been for me. But a good friend of mine brought me the five minute journal to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, that was, you know, day one in hospital, pretty much visited and dropped that off for me. And then, and I did use that quite a bit. And I think the, the concept is you just write down three things you're grateful for, you know, one, one kind of lesson you've learned today or something. And I'd, I'd kind of put that stuff, but also little things like the, you know, oh, today was my first day that I could do such and such, or, or just put down interesting things. You know, I'd, I'd, I'd bled a lot from the original injury. So I'd note down what my haemoglobin was, you know, um, I'd note down which bacteria were growing in my heel this week. There were five of them. I only even recognized one from, from my whole career to date. There were some weird and wonderful things. In fact, the clinical microbiologist came and visited me in person on the ward. So I knew it was quite a big deal. It's like combat wounds are really dirty. So lots of bacteria. So that was another kind of challenge to overcome. Um, but yeah, try, try to note down a few things. And physios, you know, I will always be writing a legally. I have to write notes after every, every session I do with a patient, but we'll try and put some markers in there. And I find myself probably with Jenny and, and look, definitely with everyone I see that because we're not good history, you know, as, as humans, we're not good at remembering history, even over a short amount of time. I go, actually, this was here a few weeks ago. And now it's here and someone who's living with it day by day, like, Oh, I didn't realize, I didn't realize it has made that progress. You know, weight that, you know, we've been using scales, for example, to measure your weight bearing and yeah. Okay. I can get 50% of my weight in that leg. Now I can get 55% of my weight, you know, and, and objectively going, you go, I don't think it's got any better than that. Okay. Three weeks ago, it was this. And yeah. So we, so note taking for physios is a little bit of like a journal and then we have to remind patients of it. And it's almost like that thing of like a sculpture every day. If they're just chipping away and chipping away, they don't see those differences, but you take a two week gap and you see someone again, or if someone loses a load of weight and you haven't seen them in half a year and you go, Oh my Lord, you've lost a load of weight. And they go, Oh, have I, you know, they've seen themselves gradually make that change in the mirror and kind of forgotten that, that starting point. So yeah. Yeah. Sometimes it's good just to zoom out, isn't it? Yeah. A hundred percent. That's good. And I think, you know, one of the things you flagged quite early is most people on this sort of journey from major trauma, they need a break at some point, you know, how I've been living my life is, you know, various torture devices given to me by, you know, all the health professionals have been treating me, you know, I put rubber bands around like my fingers to try and make them bend more and, you know, everything you do hurts and you've got alarms the whole day to sort of, okay, well now is the time you do your 30 heel raises or whatever. And a couple of weeks ago, I just bend that for two weeks and just went and turned my brain off and saw my friends and had a bit of fun and didn't even go backwards, probably progressed a little bit. Yeah. Definitely. Quick, I think quick break. Yeah. So your plan is obviously to go back to Ukraine. Yep. Are you, are you thinking, are you going to wait out there? Like, is it, how do you think it's all going to end? What's in your, how do you think be interesting to hear from someone that's actually been there and like being around people and all that kind of thing? Yeah. I mean, like I said earlier, the, the one thing that hasn't changed that I think will be exactly what you've seen it on, on TV is like the spirit of the Ukrainian people and just the resilience and the defiance because you've got people who are fighting for their homes, you know, for their families, literally fighting for their families, for their home, hometowns, home cities. And, you know, that, that is an extremely difficult force for anybody to fight against. So you see, we've got less, despite all the, you know, all the, all the wonderful support from the West, you know, we've, it often feels like we've got less of everything compared to Russia has invaded Ukraine. But, you know, that, that is extremely difficult to, to make up for. You got, you got people who are motivated defending the people they love, you know, if you're on the other side of that, that's very difficult to fight. And I think, you know, call me an idealist, but I just believe that good will prevail, you know, and, and the people who've had their, their country invaded and their land taken will, will get that back. And we have got back more than 50%, I believe, of what Russia initially took. Which is crazy because Russia is obviously a superpower and the fact that the Ukraine spirit is kind of fighting through that and prevailing is, is kind of something to be said for the Ukrainian people, isn't it? Yeah, yeah, 100%. You know, definitely the, you know, the Western donations and everything else, I would never minimise that. But, you know, the fact remains, it's very, very difficult to fight against people who are fighting for their families and for their, their home territory, their livelihood. I haven't asked you this before, but have you, have you got any, like, historical or family association with Ukraine at all? Did you know much about Ukraine before any of this? Absolutely no association at all. And I knew very little and I'm sort of ashamed to admit it now because Ukraine is a huge country and really interesting culture and the people are exceptionally friendly. You know, you can be a cynic and say, well, if you're going to, you know, go help them out medically, fight for them, you know, of course, they're going to be friendly. But no, they're just friendly. They're just good people. There are lots of parallels with New Zealand that I didn't realise when I went out there. You know, the, I think both of the countries and cultures really respect their producers, you know, the, the, the farmers, the agricultural workers, you've got that, you've got this kind of, in New Zealand, we call it the number eight wire approach. I don't know if you've ever heard of that. It's the idea that number eight, bring out the shoe horns, it's all about the shoe horns. The idea that you can fix anything with a bit of number eight wire, which is fencing wire, any, any farmer can, can fix anything with that. And Ukraine's got the same deal. And I'm sure you've seen it where you've seen the modifying drones and, you know, modifying cars to make ambulances and, you know, repairing buildings with things that, you know, you wouldn't normally use to repair buildings. And they've just got a way of making it work, a resilience and a resourcefulness. And I see parallels in that with, with New Zealand. And I guess it makes me feel a bit more comfortable there. It feels familiar. Home away from home almost. Yeah, even in the middle of wars, I think, which is a little bit bizarre. But, you know, and then the openness, I think the openness of the people, friendliness to the people that generally give you the benefit of the doubt, and they'll be friendly, happy, give you the shit off their back, you know, and it's cool. I've really enjoyed living there and learning about the culture, despite, you know, the obvious. Amazing. And I guess that's probably a nice place to sort of start to round this off. But if you had a final message that you kind of want to give to the people, what would it be? Oh, probably, probably twofold. One's the individual where, you know, if life gives you lemons, make lemonade, just get on with it. And if you can take the support from people around you and do the best you can, because there'll be plenty of other people who have faced whatever challenge it is that you're doing. And one for everyone as a whole, particularly in Britain, thank you so, so much for everything you've done for Ukraine, and please, please don't forget Ukraine. Jenny, thank you. Honestly, you know, Scott and I have been making this for a little while, but it was quite a long time ago when I'm seeing, you know, I'm treating this really inspirational individual and told him a bit about your story and was like, we need to get her on the podcast. You know, it's potentially come a bit earlier than we thought it would, but it was one of those where I was like, everything about you, your your attitude, that mental resilience, that kind of lust for learning and for life is genuinely really inspirational. You've smashed your rehab. You know, yeah, people have helped you a lot along the way, but the only person who's managed, you know, still down to you to be the person behind all of that. So, thanks for coming on. It's been a laugh. It's been a real laugh.
