What might cause a 60-year-old Far North Coast GP with a well-balanced life to develop post-traumatic stress disorder, turning his world upside down?
Lennox Head-based author, teacher and doctor, Hilton Koppe, set out to discover the answer, compiling a selection of life stories from the heart that became One Curious Doctor. A Memoir of Medicine, Migration and Mortality.
“It’s a collection of pieces I’ve written up over the past 10 or 15 years in response to things that have happened at work and things that have happened in my life, like my parents dying,” said Dr Koppe, who is also a HealthPathways Clinical Editor.
“In 2019 when I got PTSD and needed to stop work as a GP, I got thinking “why did this happen to me?”
“I didn’t know any doctors who had a better-balanced life than me. I wasn’t working too much, I had dual careers – clinical work and teaching, other interests, exercised.”
As he pondered the reasons, the idea for One Curious Doctor took shape.
“Was it the accumulated vicarious trauma from working as a doctor, or was it to do with being a migrant and feeling like an outsider, trying so hard to fit in?” Dr Koppe wonders.
“Was it because of the intergenerational trauma that came from the experience of my grandparents who had to escape their homelands to survive? Or was it just me and it was always going to happen anyway, because of my personality?”
He said writing the stories and then reworking them had been a cathartic process, although there was “always an element of risk associated with going over past traumas”. While he doesn’t have a follow-up planned, he does have an idea on the backburner – a suggestion from a reader for a companion book to One Curious Doctor about how reflective writing might be used in a helpful way, analysing the writing approach for each of the stories.
Dr Koppe said he enjoyed writing the book’s individual components, which he structured as a personal medical case history, “but I was surprised by the amount of hard labour required to bring the book into the world”.
While the effort is still fresh in his mind, “I guess the positive response to the book is like seeing a baby smile – it brings joy to the heart”.
One Curious Doctor is self-published and was launched recently at The Book Room at Byron. It is honest and insightful, “peppered with humour and pathos”, and will appeal to a wide range of readers.
Dr Koppe has been busy promoting his labour of love at writers’ festivals and also through author’s talks at medical conferences. Copies are available from his website.