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A Surgeon in…Dublin MS TAFADZWA MANDIWANZA, CONSULTANT PAEDIATRIC NEUROSURGEON, TEMPLE STREET HOSPITAL, ON LIVING AND WORKING IN THE CAPITAL s Tafadzwa By the time Taffy returned for Mandiwanza college, the city was already home to – known to more immigrants and felt more diverse. everyone as Taffy She enjoyed her studies and got along – was born and well with her classmates. She hardly left raised in Harare, the city during that time, aside from the capital of a couple of short visits to Dublin and Zimbabwe. The trips home. eldest of three children, she says the “Cork was everything,” she says. idea of wanting to work in healthcare After graduating, Taffy did her first came from watching her mother, six months as an intern in Limerick, Francisca, a nurse, at work. before returning to Cork. “My dad, Antony, is in dairy “I loved Limerick and the hospital processing,” she says, “in fact he’s there,” she says, “and was very inspired retiring soon. He is very businessby the surgeons. When I applied for the minded but I don’t have the head for BST, my first choice was the job with six business so I wasn’t tempted to go down months in neurosurgery in Cork and that track.” the rest in Limerick. At that point As a child Taffy says she was I was convinced I wanted to be a obsessed with the books of Enid Blyton, vascular surgeon. particularly the Malory Towers series. “I remember finishing up on a Friday “I really wanted to go to boarding as a dermatology intern in Cork South Ms Tafadzwa Mandiwanza, MB BCH BAO, FRCSI school,” she remembers. “My two Infirmary and on the Saturday at 8 younger brothers were allowed but o’clock in the morning I was the SHO in I wasn’t. And so I said that when it came to my time for university, I was neurosurgery in CUH on call for the weekend! My goodness, I don’t know how definitely going to go away and not live at home.” I did it. I was lucky enough to have a fantastic registrar, Martin Murphy FRCSI Taffy applied to universities in South Africa, but at the time places in (now working in Dublin) that weekend and I was terrified. What did I know Medicine were not open to students coming from another Southern African about neurosurgery? I thought neurosurgeons were scary people who shouted state that had its own medical school. all the time. “My dad had Irish friends in UCC who used to send postgraduate students “I think that weekend Martin had me in theatre for a chronic subdural over to him in Zimbabwe and he had been back and forth a few times and he haematoma and I got to drill a hole in a skull (burr hole) for the first time and thought it was a great place,” she says. “Because he had friends there who could it was amazing. At CUH I worked with Charlie Marks, George Kaar FRCSI act in loco parentis he felt safe sending his young daughter there to study. I and Michael O’Sullivan FRCSI. It was an amazing job. As a SHO you don’t of course had never heard of Cork and the sum total of my knowledge about always get the chance to go into surgery but they had me in theatre learning Ireland was that Mary Robinson had been President and I thought having a how to suture, open the abdomen for shunts and so on. I thought it was female president was amazing. I visited initially for a few weeks in the summer brilliant. At the time, the other specialty I thought I might be interested in was of 1997 and returned in 2000 after my A Levels at home in Zimbabwe to enrol cardiothoracic – I had romanticised it from a young age. There was a Sydney in the School of Medicine at UCC.” Sheldon novel with a female cardiothoracic surgeon as the main character and Back in 1997, Taffy says she often felt as if she was the only black person I wanted to be like that. But in Cork I was hanging out with the cardiothoracic walking down the street. SHO and he was overworked and exhausted and didn’t get to do much else, and “It was obviously very different from a diversity point of view to the way it I thought: No, Neurosurgery is way cooler! was at home,” she says. “That summer I became obsessed with The Corrs – I “Back in Limerick for the next 18 months, I worked mainly in A&E, absolutely loved their music, and someone took me to see the Michael Collins Urology and Colorectal, which gave me a good grounding, but I was drawn movie and I learned about some of the history and the pride in Cork as the back to Neurosurgery.” ‘real’ capital. Everyone was lovely to me and I had a great time.” After completing the BST, Taffy had her first child, Zoe, in 2008 and, on 20
