Praying for two lucky countries
A mad dash home by Patty Medland to look after her dying dad reminds an American Down Under of the value of compassion and of an Australia that still cares deeply for its people
PATTY Medland isn’t going to work on Wednesday.
Of course, as the co-founder and owner of one of southeast Queensland’s most successful orthodontic clinics, she is allowed to take a day off. And obviously her husband Bill will take care of business, looking after their hundreds of clients, but Patty needs some space on November 4 – to sit in front of a TV and watch the live result count of the US election. Born in West Virginia, raised and educated in North Carolina, married to a Queenslander, Patty has been a Gold Coast resident since 1989. But her time, like her heart, is divided between the two countries. With two adult children, one in Australia and one in America, her passports get a workout like Jane Fonda in the 80s … until recently. With COVID denying her access to both her child and childhood home for who knows how long, Patty will watch the results of the most important election in US history from her Broadbeach Waters home. Next to her will be not just the remote control, but a bottle of champagne and a bottle of red.
“If Biden wins, I’m popping that bottle of Bollinger,” she laughs. “That definitely qualifies as a top-shelf win. “But if Trump wins …” Patty’s eyes fill with tears. “I actually can’t think about it. Hope is the last thing to die, so I will wish my homeland strength. But I will be just so happy that I have another home here in Australia.”
In fact, Patty’s connection with this country – and the Gold Coast specifically – was pretty much love at first sight.
She met Bill when both were studying as postgraduates at the University of North Carolina, one of the world’s leading orthodontic centres.
The couple decided to settle on the Gold Coast after Bill took her on “a promotional tour’’ of the land down under.
“He took me to the Great Barrier Reef and I was blown away. Even the very first time I got off the plane in Brisbane and I saw all of these jacarandas, I was amazed at how beautiful it is here.
“It was October so I had left the cold of home for spring time and it just looked like paradise. The streets were so clean and there were no homeless. It felt like the land before time.
“Even now, when homelessness is becoming more of a problem, it’s nothing like in the States. And the fact that we have a true security net in terms of welfare payments and access to free medical care means that rock bottom in Australia is so much softer.”
It is one of the reasons Patty is praying for change in America. She says the death of two friends from cancer exposes the “gulf of humanity’’ between the two countries.
“I had two friends lose their partners from cancer. Both required extensive treatment in hospital. My friend here has obviously had a hard time dealing with her loss, but financially she’s fine. My friend in America not only lost her partner, she went bankrupt.
“That is not the country that I knew growing up. I was a baby boomer, I grew up in an America that was full of promise. We had JFK, we had Martin Luther King Jr, we believed in freedom, democracy and humanity.
“Over the last four years I’ve stopped recognising America. Trump is the worst thing that’s ever happened to us. That doesn’t mean people who vote for him are bad – some of my best friends support him, but he has lied to them and he’s breaking the country.
“America has become so harsh but Australia has always held tight to its humanity.
“I think I truly fell in love with this country in 1996 when I watched John Howard take real and lasting action on gun control after the horrible massacre in Port Arthur. Americans still can’t believe how we got that so right.”
She’ll never be a fan of Vegemite, but Patty says she decided to become a true-blue citizen of Australia after raising her own children on the Gold Coast. While both have dual nationality, as does she, Patty says her son and daughter both lived typical Aussie childhoods.
“Except they didn’t do Nippers … because, being American, I didn’t know it existed,” she says.
“If I could go back and change anything it would be to enrol them in Nippers, so that’s not too bad in terms of life regrets. It was a wonderful time watching them grow up here. It really is the lucky country.
“Even though I still don’t know how to spread Vegemite, raising them was like having my own Australian childhood.
“It was only when they finished school that I realised I was ready to become a citizen. They grew up Australian and, through them, so did I.”
However, Patty has never lost her ties to her home country, spending months there every year with family and work commitments.
She has held teaching positions in orthodontics and paediatric dentistry, including at West Virginia University and the University of North Carolina, as well as the University of Sydney, the University of Queensland and Griffith University.
But her dual nationality became a literal lifeline in March this year when she had to make a compassionate flight back to the States to look after her 101-year-old father.
Born in the midst of the Spanish flu in 1918 and ultimately passing away in the midst of the COVID pandemic, Patty’s father “saw it all’’ – but managed to avoid infection from both.
“Dad’s health was okay but he was alone in Florida and I was watching the news with the pandemic rolling across the world. I had to decide what to do,’’ she says.
“It really was a last-minute decision. I needed to go take care of him while there were still flights available.
“I caught the last plane out of Brisbane. As we were lining up, they were pulling people aside and telling them not to go. It was the fact that I have dual nationality that they said I should be okay. I’d be able to get in over there and get back over here.
“Once I got to the States I got my dad from Florida and drove him up to our little house in North Carolina. We pretty much just bunkered down. It was my job to keep him safe just like he’d done with us.
“I didn’t know how long I’d be there, I just wanted to keep him safe from COVID – which I did. But while I was there his health began to fail. Thank goodness I made the decision to go there when I did.
“I wanted to make sure he was going to die under his own steam, not from COVID and not in pain or in hospital.
“He was lucid to the end and I could see he was worried about the world he was leaving behind. But it was a special time for the two of us and I will never regret spending that time with him, even though it was hard to be away.”
When she returned to Australia in July, Patty was placed in quarantine in a Sydney hotel.
“On the bus from the airport I overhead a woman on the phone. She was in tears and I could hear she was here to see her father who was very sick.
“Having been in the same situation, I turned to her and told her she had made the right decision and would never regret coming to see her dad.
“She later figured out our rooms were next door and sent me a bottle of wine as a thank you. When I went to return the favour, I popped out of the room – leaving the door propped open – and put the bottle in front of her door.
“Soon after I had the police banging on my door telling me I had broken the law. I felt so awful. I had no idea what I’d done wasn’t allowed.
“They were so nice – but stern – and thank God it was all okay. Quarantine was a tough time, especially having just lost my father, but I knew this was such a small thing I could do to keep my country safe.
“Unfortunately in America, no one was prepared to make that sacrifice for their countrymen. I think our government – federal and state – proved themselves to be heroic during the pandemic.”
Patty says while it is too late to save America from the pandemic, it is not too late to turn the country around.
She appeals to Australians to try to empathise and understand the plight of Americans at a tense time.
“I remember years ago when George W. Bush won the election, my daughter found me out on the back deck, drinking a glass of wine and crying,” she says.
“At the time, she just couldn’t understand what I was so upset about. It was just an election and not even for where we were living.
“But now, 20 years later, she understands my tears far too well. Not only is she living in America, the Australian in her understands the implications this election has for the whole world. I’m praying that come Wednesday, I’ll have two lucky countries.”
My daughter found me on the deck, drinking a glass of wine and crying