Ep 13: What Being a Doctor is REALLY Like (From a Former Nurse!)

Mare Forfa (00:00)
Welcome to this week’s episode of Nurses Doing GAMSAT. Just did my little hair flick to get ready for you guys today. I’m very excited to have a guest here. Before we jump in and I introduce you to Nardia, I want to say g’day to Tom. Dr. Tom, welcome. How are you doing today?

Nardia (00:01)
Thanks.

Tom Forfa (00:17)
Hello! Great, great, great. Just recovering from my official 2025 first sunburn of the year. It’s a rite of passage for me every year—I get scorchingly burnt once, then remember, hang on, I can’t go out into the Queensland sun without full protection. And so, yeah.

Mare Forfa (00:40)
We are here with the wonderful Dr. Nardia Curtis, who we were just catching up with offline. I’m so excited to have you. We’ve got so many questions for you now that you are a doctor because we first met you when you were not Dr. Nardia Curtis, but nurse Nardia! So welcome aboard, so happy to have you here.

Nardia (01:05)
Thanks for having me, Tom and Mare. It feels like forever ago. And I will say right here and now, I still have not got used to being called ‘doctor’. It still feels absurd. There was a period when I started at the hospital, and the nurses were calling me ‘doctor’. I was not coping with that, so they changed it. Some of the nurses still call me ‘Sister Doctor’.

Mare Forfa (01:30)
Haha!

Tom Forfa (01:31)
Oh, I think I can see that.

Nardia (01:33)
Yeah.

Mare Forfa (01:34)
It’s so funny because so many med students we’ve interviewed have said they have this moment where they’re on the wards, waiting for someone to tap them on the shoulder and go, sorry, this was a big mistake, you’re not actually meant to be here. And now, ten years down the track, you’re still like, What? I’m a doctor? What?!

Nardia (01:59)
I’m still there. Still there. I’m now four years into my physician training—so exams this year and then I’m done with my physician training—and I’m still waiting for someone to say, Look, there was a stuff-up in the paperwork. Do you want to pick up a nursing shift?

Mare Forfa (02:13)
Haha, it’s always the paperwork! Everyone’s like, Oh, there’s been a big error. You passed all your exams, but no, you’re not meant to be here.

So let’s go back. Let’s start from the beginning. Let’s talk about where you were before Tom and I met you. What was life like? What were you doing? Where did you live? You don’t have to say the exact town, but walk me through it.

Nardia (02:25)
I have no skeletons in my closet, so that’s fine—I’ll tell you all the details. I’m a country girl from Warrnambool, Victoria, at the end of the Great Ocean Road. Grew up there, had my first baby at 19, and thought, Right, need a career. Nursing was it at the time.

I studied nursing at the university there in Warrnambool. So very much a country girl, didn’t go to the city—terrified, still terrified to drive in Melbourne. Now I live an hour from Sydney and I’m still scared to drive up there.

Nursing became my career and a huge part of my identity for a long time. Loved my nursing career. A lot of people assume that because I went into medicine, I must not have liked nursing, but that’s far from the truth. I absolutely loved my nursing career—to the point where I wanted to know more.

I ended up being a scrub nurse for most of my career. My nursing career lasted 11 years. I was the scrub nurse always asking, Oh, what’s that? Why are we doing this? And the surgeons would look at me like, You sure you’re not in the wrong profession?

Mare Forfa (04:04)
So at what point did you decide to make the leap? Because it’s never just, One day I woke up and thought, I’m going to be a doctor!

Nardia (04:14)
Yeah, it was a long period. I was the kid wrapping my sisters in bandages, playing doctor. But I grew up with a single mum, we didn’t have much money, and I had no idea what HECS debt was. I didn’t even know I could go to uni, let alone study medicine. It felt like a pipe dream.

Even in high school, I saw myself as a mediocre student. I wasn’t someone who got amazing marks. If something interested me, I could focus easily, but if it didn’t—like chemistry—I would fall asleep in class. I don’t remember being in any of those classes. I assume I was there?

Fast forward to my nursing career—I was running our pre-admission clinic, doing full medical histories, and working closely with anaesthetists. I was at a point where I thought, What am I doing? I’m basically doing what the interns were doing.

Mare Forfa (06:43)
Yeah, you were already working at a high level.

Nardia (06:56)
Exactly! I spoke to my in-charge at the time. We were close, and I told her I was thinking about medicine. She said, I don’t want you to go, but if you have to… Then I spoke to the anaesthetist I worked under. He was this highly experienced, no-nonsense guy. I expected him to say, No way, but instead, he said, Try this year. If you don’t get in, try again next year.

To have someone of his calibre have that kind of faith in me—it just clicked. That was it. I was going for it.