The Barefoot Healer

Well, so far it's just been weird and unpredictable. Which I guess is how adventures are supposed to be. After the fiasco with NT health and the 3 changes to where I was actually going, I finally boarded a plane that they had leased just to fly me up to Lake Nash. I felt really special! Normally you see they only do things like that for doctors...but it seems there simply was no other way to get me there... So instead of the usual large airport with all the security I am used to, I got a taxi to a private hangar with a miniature waiting room and free tea and coffee instead of expensive shops. I was introduced personally to “my” pilot, a sweet young dark haired lad, who looked barely old enough to hold a licence. We clambered aboard the tiny little plane, with just a bit more room than your average landcruiser, and he began to go through the checklist, double checking everything with procedure book and fiddling with his instruments. When he got the green light over ...

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...

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...