The Barefoot Healer

flying across the desert Another trip into the unknown...this time another tropical island a bit further east...or is it west? My sense of geography is a bit sketchy at the best of times....Warruwi community on Goulburn island. I got the job offer just last week right in the middle of relationship..well, difficulties is the best way of putting it I guess... New relationships in your mid 40's are challenging it seems. And since I am not at all stubborn, or set in my ways, OR high maintenance thank you very much, and neither is he, a short trip away to work in another remote clinic for a week sounded like a good idea.... So I simply said yes without asking any real details, and here I am. It took 3 days to get here. One to get to Brisbane by car and stay in a hotel overnight and continue the “relationship discussion” while catching up with my old friend Goblin who I hadn't seen in over a year, which was awesome! He agreed that relationships at our ages are compli...

coming to the island Well, nursing up here in the Torres Straight has been educational. The job itself involves the usual looking after patients on the ward, about 2 thirds of which are nursing home pt's awaiting placement, interspersed by the occasional harrowing time of interest when something interesting wanders into the tiny ED. There's a whole host of really interesting nurses here, mainly ED and theatre specialists who are all annoyed and disgusted at having to spend most of their shifts doing showers and moving patients in lifters, after being told by their agencies that the job was in their speciality. But realistically, in any setting like this you do need to have skilled people on hand for when the shit hits the fan. But they also need to staff the ward the rest of the time. Max, a local boy and Brian the MSF guy The range of experience the travelling nurses bring with them is pretty impressive. I've met Brian, who works for doctors without bord...

flying above the QLD desert After a bare week or so at home, I'm back in the Outback again, this time purely because I need the money. Ongoing renovations in the hope of making my house into something i can either sell or rent out is proving to be more than my basic nurses salary can cover...but this time I am struggling to dig out my happy sense of adventure. There is a deep loneliness in traveling and working as a single woman..esp one in her mid 40's. Wherever you go you are surrounded by married couples and young single people who are the same age as your kids. And it's beginning to get to me. Anyway, back to the journey itself. It all started this time with a night in a hotel in Sydney. You see the nursing agency's travel booking people had decided that a flight to Brisbane at 6 in the morning was a good idea. now add to that needing to be there an hour before take off and a 1.5 hour train journey from home to the airport, and I would have had to get up at ...

view from the skybridge above the rainforest Well, I'm back on the trail again... recently in Dorrigo, in a quiet hospital in this gentile british town up in the mountains above Coffs Harbour. The agency had organized a flight from sydney to Coffs, and then a hire car for me to drive myself from the airport up to Dorrigo... my little chariot! I felt so...special, being handed the keys to an almost brand new car. OK, so it was just a little Toyota hatchback thingy, but I've never owned a new car...and to be honest, I'm still getting used to the lifestyle that is one step above single parents pension and not quite poverty any more...so the whole traveling on planes, staying in hotels and driving new hire cars is a pretty heady experience for this middle aged lass! Anyway, I got into my sparkly white carlet (having taken a few photos so I could prove that the scratches on the door were there before I got in) and drove off into the hills. The road to Dorrigo lead...

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...

Life in the outback.... Tennant Creek Raceday was decidedly amusing. Everyone was dressed in their tarted up best...fascinators and short dressed, the men in suits and bright pink shirts... Everyone one from the white community that is, I only saw 2 or three black people. I should really say non indigenous though, there was a good collection of every other race: Maori, Chinese, Asian, Italian, Celts and every mix in-between. I managed to improvise an outfit out of a nightie, some artificial greenery and some hairclips, but the only shoes i had were my boots....and it was a tad cool and windy, so black leggings went with them, grin! Between us, Sue and i managed to lose $20.... My choices actually managed to come last! The 3 dreadlocked hippies are actually from my old home town, Nimbin! They are traveling around Australia, teaching the local kids circus performance arts! How cool is that! On the way home we stopped and filled the car with firewood, still in our pretty dresses, for ano...

My first day in the clinic.... It's all new and pretty...a lovely open round architectural design, painted white and orange...a friendly sunny waiting room and working BP and blood measuring thingies! All the staff seem friendly and open too... I spend the day working with a lovely midwife called Sue, mainly to help me get a hang of how to use the computer system, which of course is a completely different one to the PCIS system I used on Groote last year... (It sucks big time, the usual committee designed monstrosity with multiple double entries for everything...sigh.) Our first pt is an 18 month old boy...who comes accompanied by his 23 yr old mother and 4 other siblings, including a small baby. They are all filthy. And covered in sores. And dressed in filthy and totally inadequate clothes. The Mum speaks very little english, and most of what Sue is saying to her seems to go straight over her head. We manage to work out that the 18 month old is overdue for his vaccinations, which...

Well, I've escaped suburbia and headed back outback for another nursing adventure... this time out in the desert in Central Australia. First stop was Alice springs, to have a day or two of R&R with my mate Mick. Mick has been working on the community mental health team here for the last few months...pretty scary...but he seems to have been enjoying it...and boy was I glad to see him and be enveloped in one of his big bearhugs at the airport! After he dropped me and my ridiculous amount of luggage off at his flat (note to self: In future do NOT pack when you re feeling anxious and pannicky!), I headed off down to Todd mall in search of a coffee. Alice is truly an experience. I'm used to big cities, have lived overseas and have worked with people from many different cultures.....but here the divide between Black and White is So large..... Todd mall is an outside shopping strip, filled with cafes and shops full of brightly colored Aboriginal art printed on everything from clo...

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...

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...

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...