Less frequent updates
I have been accepted into RANZCR for Radiation Oncology training. There was a lot of competition for a very limited number of positions, and now I can sigh a big relief, totally by God’s grace.
As you may expect, now on top of my hospital work I have clinical assignments and self-study to do. With a small change in priorities, it is inevitable that I will be updating this blog less often, at least for now. I will definitely still be writing – and I still have many things I want to do! – but I will just be updating less often.
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If you are new around here, feel free to browse through the previous posts, or some of my favourite posts here.
Thank you to those of you who are still reading. Write to me because I would still love to hear from you!
And then the earthquake struck
When the world was ghastly shook with news of the tsunami in Indonesia in 2004 and the earthquake in Sichuan, China in 2008, I counted my blessing to be living in New Zealand, tucked away safely in a tidy corner of Earth’s colonisation.
Many other natural disasters continued to occur throughout the world, of course, and I later crossed the Tasman Sea to move to Australia just after the earthquake in Haiti hit in early 2010. It was then the anniversary of the Black Saturday bushfires that licked up a huge part of Victoria the year before. People were recounting the horror stories over radio.
Then the major floods in Queensland happened only a thousand kilometres from where I was staying, followed by Cyclone Yasi sweeping the northern parts of the same state. This time I had actual friends and people whom I knew who were in the area. Cyclone Carlos followed shortly after to hit Darwin in the Northern Territory — and I have only just been to the place earlier in 2010! The photos in the news were scarily familiar — yet now barely recognisable with the flooding, fallen trees and flattened houses on places that I have just stood in not too long ago.
And then the earthquake struck Christchurch, New Zealand, just yesterday, this time levelling the city area, catching all of us completely off-guard. My two brothers are there, and it was amazing to hear their first-hand experiences of the hospital blacking-out, being evacuated, and the general destruction of the city. It is unthinkable to imagine Christchurch without the century-old landmark buildings now — the day surely is history-changing.
I was flicking through my phone’s text messages when the earthquake happened, and the happy text messages only from a week ago of a friend finally finding a job in Christchurch, and of my brothers inviting me to play a game online together with them, suddenly seemed so distant and irrelevant now. Oh how things can change in a blink of an eye.
It is amazing too how these happenings seem to be getting scarily close both on Earth and in heart — in neighbouring states and in places I have grown up in. It is even more frightening, however, to think of how I can turn my eyes away from the news, walk along streets of Melbourne suburbs and immediately so easily get hypnotised by the calmness here.
I can’t help but to think it is not evitable that a disaster will strike my location one of these days. It almost feels like a guilty conscience! When and how would that be? Would I have a family of my own at that time? Who knows it will come when I least expect it.
It crossed my mind that if someone said, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is near” again, would it make more sense now? It is a crazy time we live in these days, how far is this going to go?
Back!!
I found that too many things were happening in my little life;
I gave this blog a hiatus, and too quickly six months have passed.
Barely in time I’ve come to catch hold the last days of 2010 –
the year would really have gone without waiting for me!
No time to be shocked
It seems like much has changed since I last updated. I worked three months in a remote Aboriginal GP clinic in the Northern Territory Australian outback — that came to an end, and I realized how unexpectedly big the experience has grown, in my life this far. It was bittersweet to leave good old Katherine in the bus that would transit me slowly back to metropolitan life via Darwin.
There wasn’t much time at all to recover from any shock nonetheless, as what followed immediately was four weeks of isolation, working disorienting shifts in the Emergency Department in the satellite town of Traralgon, away still from my apartment in Melbourne. I remember the surreal two-hour drive back to Melbourne one midnight in pitch black 3am after working ten hours of unrelenting Emergency Medicine work — when various lights would fly by in the peripheries of my car in a blurry half-awake state. Despite being third year out of medical school, this was embarrassingly my first ED rotation. After one ED shift on the first afternoon, my very second shift was already a dreaded “graveyard” night shift, where I was assigned to be the “senior resident” alongside a “junior” one as the only two doctors holding the fort for the whole night!! I dread a little to even recollect what happened that night. I know I was glad when the sun peeked out to shine on the freezing wintry day, as the morning-shift doctors started to walk in and as the hospital started to wake up. The half-limps back to my car covered in frost, to return for a sleep after the night shifts, always felt mighty good.
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oming to you
from a junior doctor who is color-blind, cleft-lipped and left-handed — this is where
I largely write about my
somewhat weird and wonderful encounters in Medicine. I wish,
though, more often than not,
that I could rather spend my days
drawing colorful pictures and bringing stories to life...... -
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