The Barefoot Healer

Full moon...last night I had a lovely campfire set up outside the unit so I could sit and contemplate the amazing huge full moon rising overhead...but of course, I was on call...and as soon as I had lit the fire, people turned up wanting to see me: "Sista! Hot baby!"..and indeed it was...poor little mite, a 2 year old with a fever over 39 C...and a nasty history of chronic lung infections, failure to thrive, low iron... I gave her a shot of antibiotics, some panadol, and went back to my fire...and prayed I had done the right thing in sending her home....evacuations at night are a nightmare....a one hour drive over the WA border to the night airstrip for starters.... Seems my thoughts were heard, cos she made it through the night and came back this morning still breathing. But I decided to no take any more chances, so I've been sitting in the clinic all morning waiting to hear from the Royal Flying Doctor service what time the plane will get to the local airstrip here (...

Sorry, no photos here this time guys... The browser in the clinic is so antiquated the blog program doesn't work properly.... And I don't dare muck around with the computer too much, the clinic manager isn't exactly the friendly sharing type to put it mildly. Had a bit of a territorial dispute on the first day with her...I'll give her the benefit of the doubt and say her rudeness was due to overwork and exhaustion, but it still doesn't make up arrogance, dressing me down in the middle of a consult with a client or for a half arsed handover leaving me with no idea of where anything is or how 99% of the procedures in the clinic actually work, before she dissapeared to Darwin for a week. The other agency nurse who arrived with me is luckily amazingly experienced, and an absolutely amazing woman to boot, so we've managed to sort out things quite nicely between us. The Desert is dry. Really dry. You don't realize what that actually means till you are out h...

Well, leaving behind the dating saga for a bit, i'm back in Central Australia for some more adventures-and a much needed cash injection! This time I'm heading out to Docker River, a small community of around 300 people a few hundred km's west of Uluru. I've spent the last few days in Alice Springs, doing some mandatory and pretty useless "training", which as so often in our modern world, consisted of 2 days of lectures about corporate structures, the endless importance of using the correct paperwork, and the odd useful phone number of who to ring when u are trying to organize a plane evac out of the middle of nowhere... I did learn a bit more about the role and training of Aboriginal health workers... It's an odd job that was created to bridge the divide between the white medical system and the communities... Aboriginal health workers basically do nursing work. But their training is aimed specifically at the kind of things needed in remote communities. An...