Working in both emergency and aesthetic plastic surgery has given Dr Anh Nguyen balance and insight into the prejudices against the latter type of work.
By Ara Jansen
A self-described ugly duckling with straight As, Dr Anh Nguyen arrived in Australia by boat in 1979, the eldest daughter of Vietnamese migrants.
Decades later, Anh straddles two sides of plastic surgery with equal amounts of grace. She has 20 years of experience in emergency trauma plastic surgery, reconstructive surgery as well as aesthetic plastic surgery and non-surgical treatments. Anh is also in rare company as only 15% of plastic surgeons are women.
As a child in Melbourne, Anh struggled and fought against cultural stereotypes that wanted her to participate in beauty pageants and simply find a husband. She was a tomboy and a nerd who studied, ending up on a transformational journey, navigating cross-cultural and societal pressures around academic achievement, beauty and the role of women and her own pre-conceived ideas about plastic surgery.
These issues have turned into the passions which have helped drive her personal and professional life.
“I was never interested in aesthetics, I always said I would never do it,” says Anh about her eventual career path. “I thought it was just vain and something beautiful people did to become more beautiful, glamorous people wanting to be more. There must be more important things to do – I truly believed that.
“In Vietnamese culture, women’s appearances were so important, but I didn’t fit into that. I didn’t like that stereotype where girls had to be beautiful and marry well; that beauty was more important than brains. My mum was always going on about appearances, so I grew up despising the idea of making myself look beautiful because I had more important things to do.”
Anh went to an all-girls public high school in Melbourne, where “everyone knew they wanted to be an astrophysicist”. She didn’t really know what she wanted to do, but was smart enough that medicine was an option, which she eventually chose.
She studied medicine and surgery at the University of Melbourne and surgical training at St Vincent’s Hospital and The Alfred Hospital. It was while doing a residency at the Royal Children’s Hospital and seeing children with cleft palates and other physical issues, she wondered how on earth they were going to be fixed.
Amazing fix
“I always thought that plastics was only about aesthetics, but once I realised what went into helping someone like that, that’s when I got on that pathway. I started out training in general surgery, taking out gall bladders and I really loved that too.”
It was her dad who suggested she apply to specialise in plastic surgery. She ended up being the youngest Perth trainee in the discipline at Royal Perth Hospital. Anh moved to Perth in 2006 and the next year did a burns fellowship with Professor Fiona Wood at RPH while on maternity leave. She completed her plastic surgery training in 2010 having worked at Sir Charles Gairdner Hospital, RPH and PMH.
“By then I had done lots of plastic surgery and lots of trauma work and knew this was what I wanted to do. Then a mentor of mine invited me to a fellowship in Melbourne, an aesthetic one. After the first one I was sold. The surgery was technically beautiful and it was also creative, plus the patients were so grateful.
“I’ve come to realise that if you break your hand, it’s expected that a doctor is going to fix it. You don’t go to someone expecting they will give you a new lease on life and leave you feeling full of confidence and more worthy. How wonderful is that?”
Relevations
That nexus of art, beauty, medicine and science is why Anh changed her own ideas about aesthetic plastic surgery and cosmetic surgery, a field she has successfully worked in alongside her trauma, emergency and reconstructive work. An experience where she played model during an injectables workshop also helped shift her perspective.
“It’s not vanity at all. People who think they are old and ugly, not good enough or something has changed in how they see themselves can do something.”
Alongside her hospital work, Anh owns two ‘medi-spas’ which offer a selection of treatments as well as cosmetic surgery consultations and products.
Active on social media, the contradiction of how Anh felt earlier in her career about aesthetic surgery is not lost on her.
She’s also committed to sharing her experiences as a mentor for the next generation of plastic and cosmetic surgeons, passing along her skills as an educator, researcher, entrepreneur and contemporary physician.
She speaks at medical and beauty and aesthetics-focused conferences, including a recent trip to Melbourne where she spoke at a face-lift conference and then in Hawaii where she shared her professional and personal story with business owners and managers.
“I tell young doctors they can be anything they want to be. They will have the freedom and the choices if they do the hard work now and keep going. I love the ability to share that, being on the other side now.”
Anh has been a supervisor of plastic surgery fellows at Fiona Stanley Hospital since 2015 and is a consultant there as well as at Joondalup Health Campus. Being an on-call plastic surgeon and consultant to numerous Perth hospitals means she can be regularly found doing operations like reattaching severed fingers. This work keeps her earthed and keeps her microsurgery skills sharp.
“I work mostly in a glamorous environment. It grounds me to work on a major emergency, like someone cutting all the tendons in their arm. It fills my cup to be able to help someone with that. But I also like the balance of emergency and trauma work with the other work I do.”
Last month, Anh was an inductee into the 2023 WA Women’s Hall of Fame alongside 20 other inspiring local women, including journalist Victoria Laurie, Senator Dorinda Cox and WACA CEO Christina Matthews. Humble about the honour and suggesting it’s for crusaders and warriors, she’s forgetting her own journey in a male-dominated specialty.
“I am a warrior in terms of trying to change the narrative and the importance of people feeling good about themselves. If you injure your knee, it’s automatic that you’ll get it fixed. If you’ve injured your body by gaining 100kg, why is it any less worthy to fix?
“It’s just a different way of thinking about this. It’s about teaching and educating women that aesthetic fixes are not a dirty thing to want to do for themselves. Heaven knows we do enough for everyone else.”
Removing stigma
She’s not an advocate for everyone having work done but wants to remove the negative stigma for people who do. Most of her patients are women and around 10% are men, who in the main get facelifts. The most common requests for cosmetic procedures are not from beautiful people who feel it will make them more beautiful but from everyday people who have an issue with a part of their body and feel a fix will really help them live a happier life.
Anh has three children and all the pregnancies happened at pivotal moments in her career. She fell pregnant with her daughter during her initial plastics training. A specialist told her he didn’t think she was taking her training very seriously. She was thrilled to prove him wrong at more than one turn.
“Sure, I could have made my life easier if I hadn’t gotten pregnant at those moments, but life throws you all sorts of curve balls.” She fell pregnant a second time while she was a consultant and the third when she opened her first clinic.
“Between us, we’re all busy,” she says of her family. “I’m very socially active and coordinating time for all of us around the kids’ activities takes work. Weekends are pretty much always family time. I have lots of interests but rarely enough time to indulge them. I like cooking and baking. I know how to sew and I like designing and making clothes.
“What’s important for me at the moment is mindfulness. I meditate and have counselling and work with a psychologist and life coach. That helps keep me grounded and working on my own wellness. I was overworked and stressed out for a long time, and this has helped give me some balance.”
She agrees with the flight adage of putting your mask on first so you can be fit and healthy enough to help others. During COVID, she and her staff used to have planking competitions to keep their fitness and spirits up.
“My daughter is considering doing surgery, though I would encourage her on any path which makes her happy. There are not many jobs where you can say you are of service, get paid well and it’s interesting and always challenging. There’s also a side of me that says it was so hard, but you have to keep going for the rewards.
“In surgery the statistics say 30% of those who start training are women but only 15% finish. It’s not because women are not good enough. I think it’s because they decide there’s more to life. Getting this far requires sacrifice. No matter what she chooses, I don’t want my daughter to dim her light.”