Hi, I’m Dr Rose Petrohilos. 

I’m not really what people would consider a typical doctor – in fact, I’m a pretty unusual person by all accounts. My story is one of continuous struggle and endless turmoil, and yet through that chaos I’ve found myself achieving goals I never thought possible not just for myself, but for the people I treat and serve every day. It’s an honour to share this story with you, and I hope that you take from it what I’ve taken with me as my guiding light – the importance of listening to your heart. Listen to it when it beats loud and when it beats soft, and it will write for you the story of who you really are. 

I was born to hippie parents, chanting Hare Krishna and eating vegetarian meals. My birth name is actually Sachi, which I later kept as my middle name. My father, Jiva Krishna das, gave up floor sanding took a volunteer management role in a meditation centre named Gokula House when I was three years old which didn’t pay at all. My mother had a keen interest in natural health, and sometimes worked as a Shiatsu practitioner, but overall my parents didn’t make money. We lived off the dole and my father’s ability to get loans. 

We might not have had holidays or nice cars, but there was an abundance of love and care. My mother homeschooled me for the first five years of my life with absolute passion. I have baby pictures of me with word cards at the age of six months, and by the time I was three years old I could read simple picture books, by the age of five I was reading The Age newspaper. This formed the vast majority of my formal education as my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer when I was six. I wouldn’t properly join the formal educational system until distance education at grade 10, when I was sixteen. 

The tragedy of losing my mother can’t really be understood, I don’t think, unless you have also lost a parent. There is a certain kind of grief that gnaws at you in the night and drives you forwards with a loss like that. I don’t know if it was my mother speaking to me or perhaps it was something deeper, richer, more spiritual…but I probably first started listening to my heart when she got sick and later when she passed away I heard it more strongly and followed it with a fire and passion. 

This first meant that I read every single one of my mother’s books about how to heal from cancer that she had in our house and in the shed. Then, I listened again when it came to my horrible struggles with year 10 maths. Having been out of the system completely for my whole young life, I couldn’t do mathematics. I listened to that voice when I dropped maths completely for distance education in year 11 and 12 so that instead of failing, I had a very average ATAR score which let me get into a very average university and do a Bachelor of Health Science. 

I listened to that voice so many times in the year that followed then…I held my own child in my arms and I heard my heart telling me that if I didn’t provide for that child the life I wanted then that future would not exist. So I picked up my books and I started studying for the entrance exam to be a “real doctor”. It required that I do chemistry and physics at a year 12 level. I started by learning grade 3 mathematics, because that’s how far I needed to go back. 

For me, in those moments, I knew true humility. Here I was, a 23-year-old young mother with a baby who hated sleeping and I would put my head down when the baby was having a nap so that I could learn how to do long division. I listened to the voice in my heart every day and maybe had a few arguments with it about my capabilities. But I also trusted and I knew that I was doing the right thing, so whether or not I succeeded I knew had done something worthwhile. 

There is so much more to me than all the epithets that have been thrown at me over the last five years. Single mother. Dyke. Temptress. Selfish. Arrogant. Incompetent. These are the words that are used to describe me, and I wear them all as badges of absolute pride. You see, the boxes of poverty, loss, parenting and ignorance that I have broken out of couldn’t hold a candle to listening to my heart.

I walked into a hospital as a real doctor for the first time at the start of this year because I listened to my heart. I hope that you listen to yours too, and I can’t wait to see where your journey takes you. 

With love,

Rose