16 IFSMAGAZINE.COM OCTOBER 2019
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INC.BY ROBERT BRODIE
ROCHETTE
Fulfilling A Lifelong Dream
JOANNIE
Every now and then, she will notice someone on a hospital
ward giving her a certain look. A lingering glance that
ponders if she is perhaps not just another typical student
from McGill University’s Faculty of Medicine in Montréal.
They know they have seen her face somewhere though
they cannot place it right away. Eventually, the penny drops.
M
ore than nine years have
passed since that heart-
breaking week at the
2010 Olympic Winter
Games, when Rochette
lost her beloved mother,
Thérèse, to a heart attack. Somehow, she
summoned the courage to produce the
defining moment of her career — and as the
world held its collective breath she skated
to a bronze medal in Vancouver.
As it turned out, Rochette never
competed again, moving on to a life of
show skating and other off-ice pursuits
such as skydiving.
In 2015, she entered McGill University,
fulfilling a life-long desire to study
medicine. She now spends most of her days
on hospital wards, clad in a plain white coat.
A year from now, she will be addressed as
Dr. Rochette — a thought that evoked
a burst of laughter when this reality was
presented to her.
Rochette will submit her application
for the residency program in November
— “that’s the big date everyone is kind
of dreading ... and we get our answer in
March,” she said. Interviews follow in early- Rochette is scheduled to write her
licensing exam next May, and will begin
her residency two months later.
While some of her fellow students are
applying Canada-wide, Rochette hopes
to stay in Montréal, or at least as close
as Ottawa, Toronto or Québec City. “As
a resident doctor at a hospital I won’t be
able to prescribe anything and will be
supervised for the next two to five years.
Everything I do will need to be approved by
my supervising doctor,” Rochette explained.
She has not yet decided in which area
of medicine she would like to practice, but
there are already many options to consider
— and perhaps more to come. “I’ve done
all my core rotations: surgery, internal
medicine, cardiology, family medicine and
psychiatry, so I have an idea,” the 33-year-
old said. “But it’s interesting. Sometimes
you think you have an idea about what you
want to do and you think you’re going to
love it — and then you realize you really
don’t like it. It is true with the opposite, too.
“Some people go into med school really
wanting to do surgery, but after their surgery
rotation, it’s ‘nope, not for me.’ And then
they want to go into internal medicine.”
Rochette had to do surgical rotations
the past year and called it “one of the
most intense” in terms of not having
much free time away from the hospital.
The condominium she has owned in Old
Montréal for the last eight years served as
a respite for sleep, a few quiet moments
with her cat Leo, and not much else during
those rotations.
“In surgery, you start at 5:45 in the
morning, and you’re there until 7 or 8 p.m.
I would eat a sandwich in my car on the
way home, take a shower and go to bed,”
she recalled. “You don’t have a life. You don’t
see the sun for two months in the winter. I
have a lot of respect for people who do that
for a living because it’s not easy. I don’t want
to do anything surgical.”
Rochette experienced a different side of
medicine in early 2019, when she spent
a month in Puvirnituq, a remote Inuit
community in northern Québec. “It was
part of my family medicine rural rotation. I
thought it would be a really cool experience
because we don’t know much about those