I caught the travel bug. That’s how I, Anjelo Ratnachandra, a Melbourne-raised Sri Lankan immigrant came to be working in the heart of London. I landed in London five days shy of my twenty-fifth birthday. And, to the joy of my ridiculously proud parents, I was working as a qualified physiotherapist.

But if the truth be told, the travel bug had bitten years earlier. In Year 11, I was chosen to be an exchange student for three weeks in China. Other than that and two trips to visit family in Sri Lanka, the furthest I’d been from my home had been holidays in Apollo Bay with my aunty and uncle. Most other holidays, I worked to help my parents with the mortgage on our humble suburban home in Glen Waverley.

In the Ratnachandra family, education is important. Mum and Dad gave up an affluent lifestyle in Sri Lanka to give us the opportunities that Australia had to offer. At the time, the brutal civil war became too much for them. Schools were often closed because of bomb threats and that limited our opportunities. Mum and Dad left a nice home and highly paid positions in marketing, not to mention the three maids and the chauffeur, to bring my older brother, Arjuna, my younger sister, Ranmali, and me to Melbourne. You only have to spend five minutes with my parents to know that their children come first.

My parents’ sacrifice came with a cost. In Australia, their lack of formal qualifications meant factory jobs and a hardship they hadn’t known before. There were even days when we took buttered bread for school lunch because pay-day hadn’t arrived yet. Despite this, their grace and humility, coupled with their desire to give their children a better life in a world without bombs, meant that we never once heard them complain. We assimilated into Australian life without many gaffes, except for the time when Mum sent me to a casual clothes day at primary school dressed as an army soldier.

To repay our parents, Arjuna, Ranmali and I worked as hard as we could at school. I was dux a number of times and finished Year 12 with a score of 98.45 out of a possible 99.95. The day I was accepted to Melbourne University, Mum and Dad rang family and friends in Sri Lanka so that they could boast long distance. If there were prouder parents anywhere in the world, it would have been surprising. My parents weren’t proud of my score, they were proud of me. They had seen me labouring through holiday jobs – doing paper rounds and even helping the janitor at my school – any job that I could get my hands on, just to help buy my books.

I put the same effort into tertiary study that I had at school. At twenty-two, I graduated with honours as a physiotherapist. What I loved about the practical side of my work was that I could see people, treat them and see them walk away better off after my intervention.

During my training, I saw physiotherapists pushed for time and over-worked. Worse than that, there were patients not getting the service that they should have. I also saw long waiting lists at public hospitals for patients in pain. Over the four years of my course, I decided that when I finished, I wanted to open my own business and provide a prompt service to a high standard.

With my graduation certificate in one hand and the key to my clinic – a single room in a busy Noble Park medical centre – in the other, I opened my own business and slowly built up my clientele while supporting myself by working in other clinics as well. While I felt that I could help most people, there were repeat customers who gained no more than temporary relief from my treatments. They’d walk out telling me they felt better, but a couple of days later they’d be back. It was these sufferers of chronic pain that presented the greatest challenges for me. I did everything I knew how