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.

More about what has changed…