DOCTOR Rachel Jack faced plenty of difficult questions during her medical training, but there was a particularly thorny one that cropped up quite regularly.
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"Why am I doing this? You ask yourself that a bit," she remembered this week as she prepares to open a new practice in the city.
Dr Jack has returned to Bathurst, where the family property is nearby, after a career in which she's navigated the halls of teeming Sydney hospitals and faced the pressure of being a one-man band in the country.
And she says it can all be traced back, partly, to jars on tables near Penrith.
"My dad used to run the Barratt and Smith histopathology lab in Emu Plains years and years ago," she said.
"And I do remember, at the time, fascinating little human bits and bobs - yes, literally, human bits in jars - in this histo lab. Some of the pathologists were lovely, lovely guys and ones we're still friends with to this day.
"That's probably one of the things that really encouraged me to get into medicine - the fascination.
"They would try to explain to me - I don't how old I was, maybe six, maybe younger - why there was a chunk of a human liver in a jar on their desk that they were looking at."
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Dr Jack grew up on the family property south-west of Bathurst, at Caloola, and went to primary and high school in Bathurst before leaving for Sydney University.
After postgraduate medicine at the University of Wollongong, Dr Jack did her junior medical officer training at the "extremely busy" Nepean Hospital "and then I stayed on for an extra year of critical care training, which has certainly been an excellent addition to my training".
GP training followed.
"In general practice, I did a little bit in Blacktown and a little bit in Auburn and then I spent over a year back in Penrith - I kept getting drawn back to western Sydney," Dr Jack said.
"In the meantime, while all that was happening, I met my husband, we built a house in Cobbitty in south-western Sydney, we got married last year and somewhere in there as well I met my business partner through an extremely fortuitous introduction and we decided that Bathurst was definitely a good place to be opening a practice.
"So here we are."
And why Bathurst?
"The location's excellent," Dr Jack said. "It can be difficult to maintain permanent staff in Bathurst, but we should be able to get things like registrars and overseas-trained doctors.
"The population is growing rather than declining and, in terms of facilities, there is really everything that you need here.
"Except for some specialties and super specialties, the vast majority of what you need, you do have.
"It makes life as a doctor much easier when you have access to the things that you need.
"You're not saying 'I'm really sorry, but I think we need a CT scan, you're going to have to go and drive two hours to go and get one, and then two hours back'. It's kind of painful saying that to someone."
Dr Jack's practice will be in the Bathurst City Centre.
"Because we're going to be opening in a shopping centre, I would hate for people to misconstrue what I'm doing as what has become really quite popular now which is the very fast, in-and-out kind of doctors that aren't concentrating on real primary care of their patients," she said. "That's really more of a fast food medicine."
When the practice opens in early October, it will be a far cry from some of her days as an emergency department GP in the state's isolated north and west.
"There have been times when literally you are the only doctor," she said. "You're it. So deal with it.
"And if it's something that you can't deal with, well, there's always a chopper retrieval."