Monday, October 27, 2003
A crazy but somehow satisfying weekend, doing extra shifts in my old stomping ground, the Children’s Emergency dept. I went from managing intubated, unconscious patients to deciding what was wrong with a succession of unhappy, snot nosed babies and toddlers. It’s a harder job than it seems (though very familiar to me by now), and carries a weighty responsibility. However, now that I’m safely home (after midnight) I can recall with some amusement that I spent a largish proportion of my time today trying to coax a recalcitrant 2 year old that he needed to take his medication. Coaxing, bribes, threats, reasoning and sheer force all met with little success, and several hours later the score was still :
2 year old - one
4 adults – nil.
Hmm. In the end I shook hands with the two year old after a spirited contest of wills, and decided to let him go home anyway. Good luck to the parents who now have the task of giving him more medication.....
email me: piokiwi@yahoo.com.au
Piokiwi 3:37 am
Monday, October 20, 2003
There are times when I feel like Sydney is out to get me. For instance when someone zooms up my behind, beeping like crazy, suddenly sideswipes to overtake then pulls in front with a triumphant two-fingered salute. A violation of road space. Or when taxis and trucks beep noisily outside my bedroom window. A violation of my street space. But when it's jimmying my passenger side lock so now I can't open it, it becomes a personal violation.
It's times like these that all my bad feelings about Australia, and Australians, come to the fore. Sydneysiders are known as the most "American" of Ockers: shallow, materialistic, out to grab their slice of pie and to hell with everyone else. (there, now I've offended lots of people). Outsiders, even those in love with Sydney's undeniably sunny weather and gorgeous beaches, are surprisingly unanimous in this evaluation.
It is probably just because I'm feeling incredibly small and alone right now. Though I should be used to it, because I feel like this for at least a few moments every day. Let's not pretend all that stuff I mentioned doesn't happen in the Godzone of New Zealand: it does, all the time. But I'm in a foreign country with a foreign values system, road code and laws: at least if I were home I would know a little better how to deal with it. And more importantly have more than one shoulder to cry on.
I believe that New Zealanders are the kindest, fairest, most balanced people in the world. I admit that I am biased in this. Probably I am the victim of patriotic indoctrination. but that doesn't matter: I believe it, my best friends are Kiwis, and I wanna go home.
email me: piokiwi@yahoo.com.au
It's not all Bad: the view from my house in Annandale on a nice day.
Piokiwi 1:51 am
Sunday, October 12, 2003
I'm home in Auckland for one all too short weekend - a conference this time, as all of us need to catch up on the latest knowledge, meet fellow trainees, and schmooze up to bosses. As could be reliably predicted Auckland has turned on a display of its finest weather ie. wet, cloudy and cold, to welcome the visitors from Oz I had hopes of showing off my home to. Oh well. It's still beautiful. The Sky Tower (which I have gradually warmed to) is all lit up in pink, and this evening the top of it disappeared into a pink-tinged cloud just as the dusk was making the sky dark baby-blue. It looked like something out of Lord of the Rings.
The conference is on sleep medicine, and given many delegates arrived the night before at 2 am it seemed topical that one of the first sessions was on how chronic sleep deficit affected people doing important tasks. I mused that paediatric registrars are a group well worth studying for this topic, though you wouldn't be able to recruit any subjects because none of us are going to agree to missing out on any more sleep than we are already doing. True to the spirit of this research, I am returning to Oz on Monday afternoon, just in time to do some housework then head off to night shift. Ah, the glamour and the joy.
email me: piokiwi@yahoo.com.au
Piokiwi 12:14 am
Wednesday, October 08, 2003
By the end of a set of Intensive Care shifts (13 hours, 8-9 am/pm day or night), I feel slightly deflated, usually smarting from the memory of several faux pas that I have made – like asking a dumb question of the consultant/boss, caught just-in-time errors or a foolish comment to a nurse. It is then that the beauty of “saving lives” (if following a set of rules could be called this) tends to be eclipsed by other emotions.
The papers here in Oz are full of articles about "greedy doctors" who are resigning in protest rather than pay an extra medical indemnity levy. (the background : early last year the biggest medical indemnity insurer, UMP, collapsed due to its inability to demonstrate to the government it could pay for all of the huge claims now being passed through the courts due to the litiginous Aussie culture - second only to California for the number and amount of claims. The government, which insists that all doctors are covered by medical insurance, - and faced by the spectre of thousands of doctors suddenly being unable to practise - gave a guarantee for the continued survival of UMP and then proceeded to bill all its members for money to cover this). People, including me, who paid a voluntary membership fee to UMP for years (we are covered by our hospitals anyway, but are advised that extra cover is good) were suddenly hit by a bill for thousands of dollars - and are still not covered by UMP for medical indemnity. Senior doctors are walking out or taking early retirement in protest.
The real problem, as I see it, is with the Aussie "it's not my fault - it must be someone else's" culture. An attitude supported by stupid laws and poor interpretation by judges. How else do you explain a court that awarded a man millions of dollars in damages against a city council after he dived into a shallow bay after getting pissed, not surprisingly hit his head and became a quadriplegic, then proceeded to sue the council for not putting a sign up saying "please do not dive into the shallow water when drunk"?. These are of course, the same idiots who claim the dole (part of which is the 45 % of my income taken by the Howard government), then wander into the emergency department having got into some knife fight or other. A bit hard to feel sympathy sometimes, despite my Oath.... And I suffer again when local clubs and societies can't afford the suddenly rocketing cost of public liabilities insurance and I miss out on a good bushwalking trip or something.
Ah, Australians..... sometimes I'm glad I'm getting outta here!!
email me: piokiwi@yahoo.com.au
If you got through all that, you deserve a laugh - therefore a completely unrelated picture of me after a bushwalk last year, during which I spent a substantial amount of time on my bum (thus inspiring the anthem: "Ode to the Humble Butt" - see archives). As you can see, I got a lot of sympathy from my fellow walkers.
Piokiwi 2:16 am
Sunday, October 05, 2003
It's a "long weekend" here in Seedny.ie Mon is a public holiday, which I am rostered on to work. However I am off today, which meant I was out making the most of the great festivals which are on at the moment - the Manly jazz festival (free jazz, nice food, lots of happy dogs, grannies and kids out strolling among the pine trees) and the Darling Harbour Fiesta (free Latin bands, although it is still too cold to wear any of the skimpy garments required to look good in doing salsa, and I see I will have to cultivate more friends who like to dance).
My flatmate Rebecca has her 76 year old gran visiting, which means she is required to call home if she is out late to reassure gran that she is safe. (One forgets the luxury of not being accountable to one's parents when one is living away from home - see, it's not just Chinese parents). When I got home tonight, Bec's gran commented that I looked no older than 16 going on 17. I could have hugged her - after feeling rather dowdy among the svelte young things raging in Darling Harbour tonight, it's nice to know that one appears young at least from the perspective of some people......
email me: piokiwi@yahoo.com.au
Piokiwi 12:41 am
Wednesday, October 01, 2003
My cousin Ferdi aged 5 1/2 has been visiiting from Beijing, and yesterday on my day off I bravely accompanied him and my Aunty to the Zoo, at the peak of the school holiday season. Taronga Park Zoo is enchantingly situated across the harbour, a ferry ride away from the bustle of the city. From this peninsula, one can see unlikely vistas of exotic animals grazing within sight of the Opera House.
I haven't seen Ferdi since my visit to Beijing in 1998 when he was one. On this occasion, he chattered away to me in Cantonese with the assurance of one who already knows that they are in full control of the world. I found myself fielding enquiries about why my Chinese was so bad (there is nothing so deflating as a young relative correcting your grammar). I also had a hard time convincing him that I was any older than 9 years old (perhaps he had a point, as I had been busy impersonating rabbits and frogs jumping along the pavement at the time). Eventually he conceded that I might be as old as ten.
Strangely, whenever I have relatives to try to impress like my aunties, I immediately feel very small and young again, and no matter how hard I try I always end up feeling incapable and about ten years old instead of 30. Usually something embarrassing happens - once when I was trying to impress my uncle by taking him to a popular cafe my car got towed away while we were having coffee. Is this a common experience or is this just a function of my Chinese family?
email me: piokiwi@yahoo.com.au
Piokiwi 9:21 pm
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