Dr Maryanne Balanzategui

Maryanne and I trained together as nurses at the Townsville General Hospital 35 years ago. I don't know why she chose me as a friend, but suspect it was on a "you'll do" basis.  

Hospital training was no easy gig. Many times challenging, sometimes confronting, always a place and space morphing self into different takes of you. Emotions run ragged in a hospital and our training turned them into feelings we entrained into good nursing practice. You came out changed and graduated a different version of the person who walked in three years before.  

It was necessarily also a 'must have fun' time. And that girl could party.  

I was asked to mention the hospital's social club infamously known as the 'Animal House'. It was an institution in its own right that came alive every Friday evening. Maryanne was adept at navigating its social fulsomeness with that beaming smile of hers and one special feature of hers I've always been in awe of: how her clear and precise voice could pierce even the thickest noisy crowd of a smoky nightclub or the Sodom and Gomorrah screeching decibels of the Animal House.  

No one could get a bartender's attention as quickly as Maryanne, you need a friend like that.  

Our shambolic partying worked like this: One of us would get both of us into trouble, and the other would get both of us out.

Maryanne worked hard and played hard and excelled at both. Every moment lived to the full.  

Maryanne could hold her own, that I knew from the beginning. The only girl among six siblings and fresh from boarding school, she learnt self reliance was a mixture of integrity and negotiation.  

She came from a strong knitted family, the Balanzateguis, and she embraced love, loyalty, support and tolerance as pillars upon which to build her life. There was always a strong sense of that in her and I saw and admired it from the day I first met her.  

In those early days Maryanne drove this huge purple Valiant Charger (I think it was an Ingham thing), it was a monstrous car driven by this young, daintily packaged black-bobbed attitude. You couldn't see the body once it merged into the driver's seat, only the attitude.  

Only she was allowed to drive it. We would growl but never hoon up and down The Strand endlessly until Maryanne decided it was the end. I sensed then that the purple beast mirrored her external persona and her vulnerabilities remained behind the wheel, it was how I think she steered her life.  

Twice the size and three times the colour of any other nurse's car, parking it in the narrow lined nurses car park was a manoeuvre usually reserved for Tug Boat captains nudging ocean liners. Once she scraped it against a post, not much, hardly anything at all but she beat herself up over it.  

She got outa' the V8 beast and silently walked around the car like it was a crime scene. There was this silent conversation happening in her head and her eyes worked over the geometry and dimensions of error and margin. I swear if there was a black box in that car she'd have pulled it out.  

I just waited for what seemed the length of a musical cassette for her to finish. There were a couple of silent tears too. I saw then how hard she could be on herself. She tolerated little to no error in herself and that fed a resolute determination to be the best she could and maintain that standard in profession and life.  

Maryanne was a splash of red in an overcast day, or in the tired dark of a night duty shift, or predawn smuggling ourselves back to the nursing quarters. About life, I think she would say, glass held aloft in her caring hand, more than a splash of red in it: "Excellent, we must do it again sometime."  

I miss my friend.