Dr Peter Marendy

“I started thinking about being a doctor at the age of five.  It came naturally to me.  I was fairly sick when I was a baby.  And I recovered from that and then I decided I wanted to do medicine.  When I left High School in Townsville I moved to Brisbane and boarded at King’s College, University of Queensland.  That’s on River Terrace overlooking the Brisbane River.  And it was run by the Methodist Church.  It was probably the largest University College in Brisbane at the time.  And the Methodist Church took us in as boarders and the cost of being there was not exorbitant. 

“I enjoyed it, I was absorbed by it and I stayed with it.  It’s just a matter of learning what was put in front of you.  This is what you had to do.  I graduated in 1959.

“My first job as a doctor was at the anaesthetic department of the Princess Alexandra Hospital (1960).  I was under the umbrella of the Chief Anaesthetist there, Doctor John O’Donnell, who was an Irishman who went to extraordinary lengths to teach me the good things and bad things about anaesthesia.  And in my second year there I was Anaesthetic Registrar on call, which meant any patient coming into hospital who needed an anaesthetist, I had to see them.
Some patients were difficult to anaesthetise and you had to give them a higher concentration or percentage of drug to put them to sleep.  Alcoholics would be usually a little bit refractive to general anaesthetics, and you had to find out if they were alcoholics in nature because for some reason or other the anaesthetic drugs didn’t work as well with them as they did with other people.  And life went on.

“At the PA Hospital, there were two doctors whom I greatly respected.  Clary Leggett was a superb doctor as a surgeon and I used to follow his teaching when I was a resident there.  I’ll never forget about Clary Leggett, he was dedicated to surgery.  And each year when people graduated, like I did, he’d have a meeting at the Royal Brisbane Hospital.  And he would talk to all the graduates about surgery.  And his only words were – there was no surgery more difficult, than difficult gall bladder surgery.  These were the days, of course, before the laparoscopic surgery.  And they used to put a slit from one side of the abdomen right to the other and they usually get a lot of complications and people who were hospitalised for at least a week after gallbladder surgery, because of the big gash in their tummies.  The microscopic surgery certainly cleared all that up.  They’re only in hospital for a couple of days.  Big difference.  They still needed anaesthetics though.

“And Evan Thompson was extremely well known as he was a giant in his field.  He was an expert surgeon and on one occasion I saw him take out a gall bladder in 30 minutes.  Less, might have been 15.  I’ve forgotten now, it was very quick and he was so skilful.  Evan Thompson had a hospital named after him. 

“Two years into my time at the PA Hospital, I married Mary.  That was in 1961.  I was still an anaesthetist.  I did anaesthesia to begin with.  And then you do other terms like surgery, medicine, obstetrics.  No Obstetrics at the PA Hospital.  I never saw any children there neither.  That was the downside.  That’s one of the reasons why I left after two years at the PA, even though I was Registrar on call. I moved to Ipswich.

“The most frightening thing in anaesthetics was to have a condition called Mendelsons Syndrome.  The stomach contains gastric juice.  If the gastric juice is absorbed into the bloodstream, it goes to the heart and it goes to the lungs and people can die very rapidly.  Because of that and you have to be quite aware of the fact that these people should be well and truly aspirated.  In other words, you should put a tube down into their stomachs and suck out all the gastric juice to prevent their gastric juice regurgitating into the lungs.

“When I was in general practice and giving anaesthetics, one of my patients, his girlfriend used to take drugs outside.  And she’d have a quite a cocktail.  And this night when they went to bed.  She was a little bit restless.  But she settled down and they went to sleep.  And in the morning, he tried to wake her up, and she didn’t wake up, she was dead.  And what had happened was she regurgitated from the stomach into the lungs and got Mendelsons Syndrome and died.  It’s a condition which is not well known.

“One night when I was registrar on call (at PA Hospital), the ambulance brought this patient up who was vomiting profusely and he was cold and he didn’t look too well.  I noticed he was bringing up a lot of gastric juice so I put a tube down into his stomach – not into his lungs, into his stomach.  And then we aspirated as much gastric juice as we could to stop it getting into his lungs and into his ticker.  And he recovered.  Now I left the tube in place.

“In the morning, Frank Garlick, he was a surgeon at the PA Hospital.  He would do ward rounds every morning on all the patients that were admitted during the night to see what was going on and to his horror, he saw this patient with a tube sticking out of his mouth.  “What’s going on here?” he said.  You know, he wanted to know who did it. Doctor Marendy, Doctor Marendy, he did it.  “I’ve got to speak to the Chief Anaesthetist about this”, he said.  So, he went and saw him, John O’Donnell.  And guess what – John O’Donnell told him that was the correct procedure.  And the next day, there was a notice on the notice board, saying patients may be intubated if they are, you know, vomiting profusely.  Yeah, I could never get over that.

“At Ipswich Hospital, I was Senior Resident Medical Officer, Deputy Super.  And I was Anaesthetist on call because the local anaesthetist Doctor Sam Garozzo, when he found out that I was anaesthetist registrar on call at the PA Hospital, so he wasn’t going to come in for the after-hours stuff.

“It was a smaller hospital.  The Medical Superintendent was Doctor David Trumpy.  They named a bridge after him.  He was a magnificent doctor.  He came from Europe.  But he spent many years there, and during the War he did lot of surgery and he was an excellent surgeon and an excellent anaesthetist, one of the smartest doctors I’ve ever come across in my livelihood.  And I became very friendly with Doctor Trumpy and I respected him a lot.  I applied for the job of Senior Resident and because I was Senior Resident that’s Deputy Super, I was given a house and I had Mary and a couple of kids by then.  So we had a place to stay.  But meant a lot of extra work at nighttime because I was living on premises.

“So every time a hard case came in, I had to go and see them and do the cardiograms and check them over and, you know, and if they needed surgery, then I had to organise the surgeons.  But the chief anaesthetist, Sam Garozzo, didn’t come in.  I had to do the anaesthetics.  I didn’t mind.  Sam Garozzo was a lovely person too.

“If a person came in with a fracture, I had to reduce the fracture with an anaesthetic and give the anaesthetic in the ward and then manipulate it and X-ray it and then look at the X rays and then plaster it myself.  And then the next day, or a couple of days’ time, the orthopaedic specialist when he arrived, would have a look at the X rays and the reductions and 99 times out of 100, he was quite happy with it.  Because I had a lot of experience at the different hospitals.

“On two occasions, I lost patients after administering anaesthetics.  One was at Ipswich.  The surgeon rang me on a Saturday afternoon.  He’s a very good surgeon.  And he rang me up and said he wanted to operate on this person who was involved in a mining accident outside of Ipswich.  And I said, I’ll go and have a look at him.  So I went and saw him and I rang him back and I said, “Sir, I’ve looked at this patient.  I’m afraid I don’t think he’ll stand a general anaesthetic.  He’ll die, on the table.”  He said, “Well, I want to operate.”  I said, “I’ll have to talk to the Superintendent.  So I rang up the Superintendent, and after some discussion with another doctor, he gave me the go ahead.  I went ahead and, of course, the patient died.  Then I heard nothing about it.  Normally, if a patient died on the anaesthetic table, I would be crucified.  You know, they want to know why and how come.  But that was the end of it.

“Now the second time was when I was giving anaesthetics in Redcliffe.  There were anaesthetists there as well, and it was a Saturday afternoon and I remember saying to myself where have the anaesthetists gone?  Why is he picking on me on a Saturday?  Anyway, it was David Thiel.  Well, here we see a lot of the senior surgeons from Royal Brisbane used to operate in Redcliffe because it was it was operating as a hospital when they had trouble getting beds.  And being the anaesthetist plus the specialist anaesthetist which arrived as well. You know we were fairly busy.  Anyway, this was David Thiel and there’s no way in the world I’d knock him back.  So he rang up and wanted to operate on this patient.  I said I’ll go and have a look for you, David.  So I went up there in the morning, Saturday morning and looked at her and I said, David, I think it’s OK to go ahead with this girl.  I think she’ll take an anaesthetic.  He said OK, we’ll do it at 2 o’clock or 1 o’clock in the afternoon if that suits you.  They always ask if that suited me.  I said, yes, that’ll suit me. So at 1 o’clock I got there and put her to sleep.  There’s no trouble with putting her to sleep, putting the tubes down. 

“But then after about 10 minutes, I noticed that her pulse rate started to increase and the blood pressure started to drop and I said to David, “This patient is deteriorating.  Do you want me to resuscitate her?”  He said “Just hang on a minute.”  And so what he did, he opened the abdomen put his hand inside and had a feel around and said to me, “This patient is dying from cancer, inoperable.  Let her go.”  So I let her go.  She died.  And that was the end of that.  I never heard anything more about it.  I never heard from the specialist anaesthetist.  I never heard from anybody.  Normally there they would have been hell to pay.  That’s one of the things you have to be careful of when you’re giving anaesthetics.  Is there’s somebody looking over your shoulder all the time.  And they’ll criticise you if they can find an opportunity.  But I never had anything like that.  I’d say I’ve given something like 20,000.  

“After Ipswich, I went to Townsville.  In my third year at Ipswich, I got a letter from the Superintendent of Townville Hospital asking me to go up there to take on the registrar’s job and surgery.  So that was the beginning of 1964.  And I said that’s acceptable, because my father lived in Townsville.  And he had cancer of his pancreas.  And, you know, he was in and out of hospital all the time.  So I was up there with him. So that suited me.  I was made Registrar in charge of Casualty.  Registrar in charge of the medical wards.  All the people who went in there with heart disease and that I had, but there were specialists as well that used to come in.  Registrar in charge of the Kids ward.  We had a paediatrician looking after them and Registrar in charge of all the elderly.  You know the 90-year-olds that were sitting in the in the nursing home.  And consequently, I was up every night of the week, but I never did any obstetrics.  I never did any surgery, and I never did any anaesthesia, and that was that.

“And then what happened my father-in-law, Mary’s father, rang me up and said, “They’re starting up a new hospital in Redcliffe.  They’ve started on it and they’ll be looking for doctors.”  I said, “That’s interesting. I’ll come and have a look.”  So I went down and had a look and I said, “Yes, I said this is good. I like Redcliffe.”  I had rellies in Ipswich.  But the big plus was there were picture theatres at Redcliffe – Scarborough, Redcliffe and Woody Point, picture theatres.  And they owned them.  So if I was practising down here, it was free pictures every night if I wanted them, and free feeds at the sandwich bar.  And of course, that suited me because they had somewhere to operate.  So I said yes. I’ll come down.  So I did and the practice was for sale, so I bought the practice in 1965.  I came down and bought the practice off the doctor that was in charge, he was an ex-army doctor and he wanted to, Lance Grimmett was his name.  He wanted to go up to Brisbane to look after the repatriation to look after his staff up there.  He was snowed under with house calls and God knows what a lot of people retired down here you see.  So I started doing that.

“And then the Superintendent of the hospital, Graham Hyslop, rang me up and wanted me to come and give anaesthetics.  He was a Surgeon and I said – “I didn’t come to Redcliffe, to be an anaesthetist to the hospital.  I said I don’t think I can spare the time.  I’m in General Practice now and I’ve got a whole stack of patients to see.  And I said I don’t think I can fit them in.”  He said, “Well, I’ll have to get some of my staff to give ethyl chloride.”  And I said, “Like hell, not gonna do that.  It’s alright if they’re young and experienced and they’ve given you know, a couple of 100, they know what they’re doing.  But if you take a person who’s just qualified and sitting in your hospital and doing nothing and expect him to give these drugs, ethyl chloride and open ether, I said, you’re looking at danger.  I said they’ll vomit their guts out postoperatively and you’ll have catastrophes.  So I’ll come and give your anaesthetics for you.”  So he said “Alright, that’s fine.  So you start off in two sessions a week to see how you operate.”

“But besides him, there was another surgeon who attended the Redcliffe hospital.  His name was Chiller Wilson.  Now Chiller Wilson was an Obstetrician/Gynaecologist.  As you know, Obstetricians are always in the operating theatres, you know with Caesarean sections and with everything else.  And he got me to give his anaesthetics for him so then I kept on getting dragged out to look after Chiller’s anaesthetics.  But also in the meantime, seeing that I told the surgeon that I’d be available, I was doing all the after-hours anaesthetics for appendectomies and you know the traumatic stuff as well. 

“So it kept on going on and on and on. And then to make matters worse, after a while.  Well, the local dentists heard I was giving anaesthetics.  They wanted me to give anaesthetics in their dental surgeries and there’s quite a few of them.  The one of the most for me, was a dentist who’s working at Woody Point.  He had his own surgery there and wanted me to give anaesthetics minimum once a month.  It was full combined anaesthetics because he was getting their front teeth and then doing them up.  And I’d have one of those a month to do and they would take a couple of hours by the time I finished with them.  But anyway, I didn’t mind.  

“And by now they had another anaesthetist that was coming to the hospital,  Kerry Garsky.  He was pretty strict and he joined the club.  And started giving anaesthetics.  That was his job and later, others joined the club and there’s more anaesthetists coming in, but we had more and more operations.  We had more and more people visiting the hospital.  And the ones that I used to anaesthetise you know, for a long time, most of them were the doctors, were specialists from the Royal Brisbane Hospital, you know, very high-quality staff.  And I was giving the anaesthetics for them and that didn’t go down too well with Kerry Garsky, I can tell you.  But the others didn’t seem to mind, you know.  But anyway, that doesn’t matter.  I wasn’t there to be an anaesthetist.  So I was there just to help him out.

“And then the hospital started to grow, overgrow and people had to wait to get their operations.  And I looked at it and I said that’s strange.  I said maybe we can help them here.  I said a friend of mine, Peter Freeleagus, he and a couple of partners were in the habit of building small hospitals.  And I said maybe we need something.   We need another small one here because we’ve got a lot of specialists coming down here now and you know the workload was increasing all the time.  I said, well, we going to need to start up another hospital, but the fact that I knew him, I knew what he was doing.  I said, well, the best person I can talk to is Peter Freeleagus opened up a private hospital (Peninsula Private Hospital), so that gives them extra beds.  So I got him on the phone.  He came up and saw me.  And I said, Peter, I said we need another smaller hospital here.  And I said there is some land available on the northern part of Redcliffe, quite large and enough there for a hospital, enough there for parking enough there for you know, a fairly big hospital if you want to build it.  And see how you go.

“He says okay, so he and his partners went into it and they built the operating theatre.  And I said, well, we’re lucky with the operating theatre because I know a lot of the nursing staff who used to work in the theatres and a lot of them have sort of given it up.  And I’m sure that that if you if you offer them a job in your hospital, they’ll probably take it up.  And they did.  And then I said if you want accommodation for your anaesthetists, you know, to give them rooms there and also your specialists have rooms there as well.  He did all that and naturally things started to flourish and it’s still flourishing today.  I gave a few anaesthetics in the beginning there where they didn’t have anybody. But after that I just stopped going there. 

“I received the Order of Australia Medal some years ago.  I was made Honorary Life member of the Redcliffe District Local Medical Association.  And I became a Life Member of the Redcliffe Medical Association.  I became an examiner for the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners.  I was interested in Rotary and I was President of the Redcliffe Rotary Club on at least three occasions and they made me a Paul Harris Fellow.  That’s from Rotary International for my services.  That was part of it as well.  Now I don’t know how I got the OAM and I didn’t have anything to do with that.  Somebody thought I deserved it and put my name down, I suppose.  Because I know there’s a couple of other doctors who I knew in Redcliffe.  Not practising anything but just outside and these doctors have done exceptional service to medicine and they’re not recognised. 

“We’re a friendly business.  Some of the patients I was a little bit antagonistic to.  But the majority of them, you know, I’ve got letters of thank you everywhere.  Well you get to know them because they’re telling you their innermost secrets.  Uh, particularly when I see patients who’ve had a lot of medical problems and they’ve been able to settle them down and they get very very thankful for the fact that you know we’ve got the got them back on their feet.  I’ve got quite a few that were in that boat.  One of the reasons was because when I was an anaesthetist I used to do a lot of anaesthetics, local anaesthetics.  And a lot of them have these problems with their backs and I was used to doing injections into the spine.  And I got good results with it.  You know, if you’ve had a backache for 10 years and then all of a sudden you find that you’ve got no pain, yeah, you’d be very surprised.  They were so grateful.

“And then the other thing that I did is, I got into this business of addiction.  And I became what they call a methadone prescriber.  Instead of getting them the opioids, you’d give them methadone, which would act as an opioid and would take away their, and you can control their mania, you know, or their lust for the drug.  And I did that for a 10-year period.  I must have seen over 100,000 patients.  Yeah, I had 100 patients a year.  And they kept on coming back and back and back.  And I was dealing with the State government.  They had an office there that handled all that and my methadone was covered.  I would order it through the wholesalers with the permission of the government.  And that’s what I did.  I used to love it.

“They still are a big problem, but you know, they’re gradually getting on top of it.  See some of these drugs when they take them, they make them different people.  They’re not peaceful and they’re not reliable.  They get cranky and they want and want and they’ll lie at the drop of a hat, particularly if they want something.  I’ve got one instance where one patient was addicted to opioids and he wanted compensation.  He wanted compensation and he got it.  Because he was abused when he was, he was a young kid in one of the hospital departments and he went to one of these solicitors.  There’s no win, no fee.  And then he got a good sum.  But you see, you can’t trust them because this character he wasn’t satisfied with what he’d got. He wanted more, and so he blamed me for his troubles.  Anyway doesn’t matter.

“I have a grandson in second year medicine now.  He’s saying he’s got my name, Peter Charles Marendy.  He wants to take after his grandfather.  Now, well I am very proud, also I have a grandchild doing law and he’s pretty shrewd.  And another grandson doing structural engineering. 

“To be a good doctor, you have to want to do it from start?  It has to be within you.  I could never become an artist ‘cause I’ve got no mania to start painting and drawing.  I couldn’t do it.  The same thing happens with medicine.  If you wanna be in medicine, you gotta do it properly.  And that’s life.

“We’re living in a very strange society at the moment.  What convinced me to hang up my stethoscope was one of my patients, who was an addict, and I helped him out a lot and he had a son who was also a big problem and this person was addicted to all sorts of drugs.  And I helped him out financially as well because he had nowhere to go.  He was living on the street with his son.  And what he did to me was, he used to come in with a lot of anxiety and stuff like that.  So I’d give him an injection for it and you know, it would settle down.  Now there’s a new drug out called Hypnoval which we were not familiar with.  It was a sedative type one.  It wasn’t as potent as the anaesthetic drugs I used to use.  But it was on the doctor’s back supply so you could have, you could go with five or six samples of it and have it for the odd patient.

“Now, this patient that I’m talking about, he came up one day with a lot of anxiety.  He wasn’t settling down, so I said I’ll try the Hypnoval on you.  So we gave him a small dose of Hypnoval in his arm.  And we watched him and we checked his blood pressure and pulse rate and made sure he was all right.  Checked his heart and then listened to his chest and all the rest of it.  No side effects.

“So that was the first day and he found that it gave him some relief.  So he came back the second day for another injection, which we gave him and did all the examination parts and this was not a very potent drug, but it was enough to do the job.  He said that’s fine.  So he had two injections.  On the third day he came up for his injection and I said, listen.  I said we just can’t keep on giving you injections.  I said I’m gonna write you out a script for two. I told the girls.  Now the thing was that when he and his father used to come up here.  The place would be full of patients and guess what they used to do.  They’d be watching my door.  When the patient I was seeing moved out, they got up and walked straight in and closed the door behind them and wouldn’t go until they got what they wanted.  Anyway, I felt sorry for the father because the son was bad news.  But anyway, that’s the problem we had.

“Anyway he got easy money by going to court and taking some organisation to court because he was abused when he was a kid.  And of course well, I supported him with that.  And when he got the money, he found it was easy to get.  So then he just he’d look at other things.  And that’s where the trouble started.  He started making statements which were untrue.  And what would happen after I gave him two injections and we had nothing left in the box, even on the doctor’s form.  But it wasn’t a very potent drug compared with the stuff that I used to be using and the side effects were very minimal.  The girls said to me, we can’t look after this bloke anymore.  We’ve all written letters of resignation.  The three of them, the nurse and my two receptionists.

“They got sick and tired of the way he and his son behaved.  Of course, I didn’t know.  I was sitting here you see.  Anyway, so I said, right but as far as Hypnoval is concerned, it’s restricted.  I’m only going to write two prescriptions because you’re gonna come back for more later.  So and they’ve got to be in the surgery here.  Guess what he did?  He howled at my nurse to give him more than two, wasn’t enough.  My nurse wrote out a script for about 8 ampules or 6 ampules, something like that, without telling me.  I assume she ordered that number for the doctor, for the bag supply.  You know, for the doctor’s supply over here.  But I knew nothing about it.  The chemist rang me up and I was very surprised.  He said, what’s this business about the Hypnoval?  And I said, I don’t know anything about that.  I haven’t written those sort of scripts.

“And the chemist went ahead and prescribed them.  And guess what he did?  What’ser name come along before he prescribed them.  The nurse came along and showed him the prescriptions there where we’ve got the script for 8 tablets there.  He took it off her hand got on his son and walked out with it.   And guess what?  He went down to another doctor at the PA hospital and gave them gave the script and showed him the script to the doctor.  She nearly had a fit when she saw he was given that many.  I don’t think she had any experience in anaesthetics or anything like that.  And made a complaint.

“And it went to APRA and APRA were aghast at all this, they knew nothing about it and as a result of that, I decided I’d give up.  That’s what happened.  That was one of the reasons I gave up.  But anyway, that’s life. I’m quite happy.  Well, the thing is, having given it up, I don’t have to treat them.  So they can’t accuse me of overdosing and with doing anything anymore because I’m not doing it.  That’s where the problems are. 

“As a result, we just do the best we can and then that’s another reason why I’m moving away from it because my memory used to always snap in, but now it shatters a bit, it stops and then without thinking pops back up again.  Well, that’s not good enough.  Anyway, I’ve had a good run and I used to get on extremely well with the State government medical side.  One point APRA found out that I was 91 years of age, going on to 92, they thought it was about time I retired.  I said that was probably a good idea.  I should retire.  Now I’ve got an empty surgery.

“I think I’m one of the few that’s been targeted by different people.  And I just have to accept it, that’s all. If I was much younger, I’d be jumping up and down.  But at my age, going on to 92, I’ve gotta face the realities of the fact that I don’t know how much longer I’ve got.  I might have five years, maybe 10.  Anyway, that’s life.

Dr Marendy was interviewed in February 2024.

He passed away in May 2024.