Some have a job and a hobby. She has a profession and a passion. As a doctor, she found her calling in palliative medicine. As a musician, she pursues her passion by performing on stage as a pianist and singing soprano in a choir.
Her patients know her as Dr Catherine Byrne. When she plays the piano or sings in the choir, she goes by her married name, Catherine Smalberger. Medicine and music are two constants that have defined Catherine’s life over time and across continents.
Born in Derbyshire as the oldest in a family of four girls and two boys, Catherine was the first in her extended family to go to university. Since she was a little girl, she had always wanted to be a doctor, but at school all her best subjects were arts. While she was doing well at sciences, they weren’t her natural bent at all.
At age six Catherine started piano lessons with a teacher. However, it is her maternal grandfather whom she credits for sparking her love of music. When she was seven, he took her to a concert version – no costumes or sets – of Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni. “You would think this would put a seven-year-old off for life, but I just loved it.”
SELF-DOUBTS
For the first two years at university Catherine didn’t enjoy the course because it was pure science. She seriously contemplated dropping out but wasn’t brave enough to do it because she knew how proud everybody was of her. Luckily, she followed the advice of her mother. “She said: ‘Wait until you get to the wards. If you still hate it, then leave’,” Catherine remembers. And as predicted, from day one she thrived on the contact with patients.
By the time she went to university Catherine had studied piano privately and had passed all her music exams. She also took the exam for her Associate Diploma. “My teacher was great for playing the piano, but he didn’t really help me much with the theory. I passed the practical part, but I failed the theory and didn’t get the diploma.” For years she never considered herself a proper pianist because of that. “It hung over me. I thought I’d never do it again.”
After finishing her degree and her years of practical training, Catherine didn’t feel ready to settle down yet. Instead, she took a job in Canada, where she met her future husband, a South African doctor, who worked at the same hospital. Following some back and forth between England and South Africa, they settled in Cape Town. Catherine learned Afrikaans and secured a position at Groote Schuur Hospital, staying there for five years.
SETTING UP AIDS CLINICS
The enormity of the AIDS epidemic had just become obvious, and Catherine wanted to work with HIV-infected patients. “Most doctors didn’t. AIDS was like leprosy,” Catherine puts it. She was involved in the very first AIDS clinic at Groote Schuur Hospital – as far as she knows the first one in South Africa – and in setting up an AIDS clinic for the mothers of children with AIDS at Red Cross Children’s Hospital. “Later I set up another AIDS clinic in George, which I see is still going,” says Catherine. There was no cure, though there were a few medicines that helped.
“I couldn’t do a lot for my patients, but I could give them a hug, show respect and love, and treat them politely.”
STRUGGLING TO SETTLE IN
In 2002, her husband, by now a consultant anaesthetist, accepted a locum job in Tauranga. Catherine was devastated and said: “I can live anywhere in the world except Australia and New Zealand. It’s too far from Europe. I’ve done my southern hemisphere bit in South Africa.” It took her at least five years to settle here, “helped by wonderfully supportive friends and family,” she adds.
In Tauranga, Catherine found there was no need for her, or so she thought. Running AIDS clinics in South Africa she had felt useful because she was looking after the sickest people nobody else wanted to care for.
But as luck would have it, she met the then CEO of Waipuna Hospice. “We need more doctors at hospice. A lot of doctors don’t want to work with the dying. Would you be interested?” Catherine went to have a look – and has been working there in palliative care for 19 years. “For me this was the replacement for my work in AIDS clinics – the right place for me to work, a niche that I fit into.”
A MASTER’S IN PALLIATIVE CARE
At Waipuna Hospice Catherine studied a Diploma and then a Master’s degree in Palliative Care through Flinders University. In 2019 she was awarded distinction on completion of her Master’s research project based at the hospice.
She also worked as a GP in various medical centres – the last one for 16 years. “But I realised that the aspect of general practice I really liked was dealing with patients who had cancer or were dying. I wasn’t so interested in ‘the worried well’. I wanted to work with really ill people.”
As well as working at the hospice, earlier this year Catherine joined Cicada Health, a company that provides primary care to patients in aged residential care in greater Tauranga. “With this job and the hospice I’m no less busy now than I was in general practice.”
For her, it means playtime in the garden.
DA CAPO: THE PIANO DIPLOMA
Changing countries for Catherine always meant looking for a local piano teacher. In Tauranga she found a marvellous teacher in the late Beverley Read, and it was she who made her re-attempt and finally get her Associate Diploma, ANZMEB, in piano performance. “Now I am studying for the next level, the Licentiate Diploma, LNZMEB, with Chalium Poppy, founder of Scholars Baroque Aotearoa.”
Since 2019 Catherine has also been singing in the auditioned Scholars Baroque choir, where she can perform high classical music. “It’s my highlight of the week. I just can’t wait for Tuesday night rehearsals. It’s the one thing that everything else gets cancelled for.” Finally, she found everything she wanted: “I joined the choir and took singing and piano lessons. I was accompanying and played a few piano solos. And now I’m learning the organ as well, which is difficult for me as it is nothing like the piano.”
GIVING AND RECEIVING PLEASURE
When she sings in the choir or plays the piano, Catherine can feel that indescribable electricity in the audience and knows she has given them something.
“In return, music gives me a real high. In the end I feel like floating on air for days afterwards. It’s like a drug, but it doesn’t do any harm.”
In medicine, it gives Catherine pleasure if she can make somebody feel better, especially in palliative care when nothing can be done curatively. “There are seemingly little things, like stopping symptoms. But it’s really a big thing for the patient if the pain, the nausea or the vomiting stops. There is so much you can still do to help and bring relief.” This happens to her regularly, and she finds it utterly satisfying.
NEVER A MATTER OF EITHER-OR
Catherine’s life has never been a matter of choosing one or the other. Despite moving between continents and having to find her feet again each time, she has succeeded: in music, in medicine and, most importantly, in achieving consonance and harmony by reconciling all aspects of life that matter to her, “including travelling to Italy whenever I get the chance,” she laughs.
Now in her happy place, is there anything the mother of four still misses? “Yes,” says Catherine with a dose of British humour. “Christmas should be in winter. Easter should be in spring. I can’t get over it. I’m depressed every Christmas because it’s in summer.” But this minor seasonal flaw is tolerable in the grand scheme of things that have fallen into place so perfectly otherwise.