How Africa shaped Emily’s healing life

EVER since she was eight years old, Emily Isham knew she wanted to help the less fortunate through medicine.

Kingborough GP Emily Isham with children Eleanor, left, 18 months, and Ned, 4, has helped those in the third world through medicine. Picture: NIKKI DAVIS-JONES.

EVER since she was eight years old, Emily Isham knew she wanted to help the less fortunate through medicine.

When she was just two, the Melbourne-born doctor moved to Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of the Congo, with her missionary parents and siblings where they lived for the next 10 years.

Living near the Rwandan border, the family was forced to return to Australia not long after the 1994 genocide began.

“I could look out my bedroom window and smell the gunpowder and hear the gunfire,” Dr Isham said. “We had refugees surrounding us in our backyard with the UNHCR.”

Completing her studies in Victoria, she later returned to Africa to work at the Hamlin Fistula hospital in Ethiopia to help with treatment and prevention of childbirth injuries.

She also founded the Mafunzo­ Project, which sponsors Congolese medical students and nurses through their university and hospital-based training.

It was during a holiday in Tasmania she met and fell in love with her now husband Seth and settle down to start a family.

After dedicating years to helping those in developing countries, she has now had to turn her focus closer to home.

The couple’s son Ned had not long turned two when he suddenly stopped walking.

“It was the same day my parents flew back to the Congo — six weeks later he was diagnosed with high-risk leukaemia when I was also 11 weeks’ pregnant with Eleanor,” Dr Isham said.

More than a year of intense treatment later, Ned, now 4, is in remission, but still has daily chemotherapy treatment at home and regular hospital visits.

“Every time I feel like saying ‘woe is me, we’ve had a rough time’, I think to myself if we were in the Congo or Ned was a Congolese kid, he wouldn’t be alive because they don’t have chemo there,” Dr Isham said.

“So we’re very fortunate.”

Now working part-time as a GP registrar at the Kingborough Medical Centre while raising her three children, Dr Isham hopes to take her Royal Australian College of General Practice Fellowship exams and hopes to head back overseas in coming years to expand on the Maf­unzo Project and continue to help those most in need.

Originally published as How Africa shaped Emily’s healing life