The Barefoot Healer

Another Lazy Saturday...not. At 8.30 Im still half asleep and in my nightie, and the on call phone rings. A painter has fallen off his ladder and the ambos are bringing him in in a hard collar.... I wander over to the clinic grabbing a banana on the way thinking this is going to be nothing as usual, going by the things they have brought me in on previous occasions...but when I actually open the collar and have a decent feel myself, sure enough, the poor lad has serious c spine tenderness on C3! So i ring the on call doc and tell him he's gonna miss his early round of golf, and he comes in grumbling...and after checking himself grins, and says "Well I know what You're gonna be doing today!" and he tottles off home for a decent breakfast while I stay behind to watch the patient. 15 mins 2 phone calls and some paperwork later, it's just me and the poor bloke on a hard board strapped into a plastic collar sitting here awaiting the final call back from Care Flig...

A whole weekend off....far from friends, family and my beloved perfume workshop.... This morning I decided to fill it at lest partially by going to the gym. The gym is provided by Gemco, the impinging company, but we health staff get to use it too it seems.... I take the clinic hilux ( a little nervously after I managed to put a dent in the back door trying to park it quickly in the dark when I was on call the other night) and head on down.... The gym is basically a large shed on stilts with every kind of machine you could think of for torturing a body into better shape (and no, none of them go "Ping!"). I'm a tad nervous about entering into this primarily mans world on a bloke dominated mining island as a solo woman, but to my relief there's actually only two women in there sweating happily away on the treadmills... some time later I've found out that I'm still fit enough to row for a whole kilometer and peddle a bike at reasonable resistance for another 2 1...

On Tuesday I was first on call....which meant that I had a mobile that people could ring to call me in to deal with, well anything really.... Scared as all hell...no idea what to expect...I spent the afternoon rummaging around in the little resus bay trying to work out what where everything was, much to the amusement of the other nursing staff. "Chances are you'll never use that stuff lass, settle down!" As may be, I felt a lot better once I had worked out how to turn on the oxygen cylinder and had located the emergency drug box and the airway stuff....so I calmed down a bit and decided to go out to dinner to the ARC, the local club, with one of the other nurses who had just arrived from another island, and as soon as we had ordered dinner, the phone rang. "sister, my lil girl she got bad tooth spin, can u come? We at the clinic!" So I hopped back in the can and drove back deserting my chops and chips and my dinner companion, to find a whole indigenous family at...

This was the view flying into the island..... The inviting and luxurious baggage collection area, grin! Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

landed on Wednesday evening, and the first sign that I'm now in a different world was the airport! Barbed wire surrounding a runway with a basic office, and the new addition of a roof overe the baggage area so you don't get soaked waiting for your luggage! I spent the first 2 nights at the "young doctors house" where the juniors and the medical students get to hang out, and the finally ( after some juggling around of who was supposed to go where, claimed one of the flats behind the medical centre as my own little cave for the next month. A fifties motel room throwback within a nice metal cage...against hurricanes? Angry natives? Beer shortage riots? Who knows....but it has fans, air conditioning that I turnoff most of the time and a decent size flat screen tv that gets ABC, SBS and imparja... I'm supposed to be working in the mining town clinic, which sees mainly white people, but the last 2 days I ended up being sent over to the neighbouring town which is indig...

r the journey so far After 7 years of frustration, I decided to escape the insanity of suburbia and accept a one month contract working as a nurse on a remote island up in the Northern Territory of Australia. This is my story. Day One Three days of education and being holed up on my own in a lonely hotel in Darwin...hot and pleasantly muggy outside, and arctic freezing as soon as you enter a building! Every shop seems to be competing to see who can turn their air conditioning up highest...I ended up switching off the one in my hotel room and opening the window so I could listen to the sounds of the evening rain. First day was cultural education....Richard, a seriously interesting bloke with "one little arm and one big one" as he put it... a traditional land owner of the Larrakia people (which has a lot more significance than I realized at first...I had the uneasy feeling all along that I was listening to someone I should really be paying attention to...kept on being caugh...