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...

Well, that last post of mine ended the hatchling relationship...self fufilling prophecy? Or just a sign of exactly what I was talking about.... Dumped New Style, blocked on facebook, skype addy removed...and suddenly the connection you had is dead in the water, as if it had never existed. The photo on the FB chat thingy, dark eyes and quirky grin above that wide manly chin that made your heart beat that little bit faster every time you saw he was online is suddenly replaced with a blank human outline and the name "facebook user" and finally: closed as a contact on the dating site. More than 2800 messages.....a relationship in words and thoughts...did I just imagine it all? What the hell happened there? I ended up taking that next road trip...and cried all the way up there..and most of the way back.  Visiting old friends who've known me for over 20 years and asking for their opinions and some kind of explanation and feedback to WTF just blew up in my face and WHY??...

Today I thought I'd write about Love, Sex and Relationships....hence the car. (It'll make sense towards the end, I promise...) Of all the things that affect our Health, Relationships are probably the most hard hitting and the least controllable. Divorce and Losing a Loved One rank highest on the list of stressful events that impact our health, yet it is also something we are least equipped to deal with, both personally and as health professionals. As some of you know, I work in mental health as a nurse. And 9 times out of 10, what brings people through the doors of the unit is problems with relationships. Regardless of whether we are talking suicide attempt, drug abuse or depression, most of the time, the trigger is a broken heart. A lover who left, or cheated, and sent the client spiraling into an out of control binge of drug taking and self despair which ended at 3 in the morning on the tracks of Wyong railway station. Slashed wrists cos he's been sleeping with the...

Well, I'm in Alice again, looking out at one of the Sleeping Caterpillars of the McDonnell Ranges. Last night was open mike and art show night at Ningke Nungue in Tennant Creek...with a whole host of women showing and selling their paintings from neighboring communities, and a concert of yukeleles of all things, which are suffering from a strange revival in The middle of the Red Centre... Today a 5 hour drive, broken up by a delightful breakfast in the pub in Wauchope, which has the most delightful garden full of gnomes and rustic wooden tables hidden behind it's typical outback colourbond fence. Peta, one of the other RAHC nurses and I took it in turns driving along the pretty close to dead straight Stuart Highway, past the one and only Mango and Vege farm back to Alice Springs. It was quieter here this afternoon than on my way up....its cold and windy, so there wee only a few locals out sitting on the grass of the Todd Mall, and much less of an underlying feeling of agro and...

My last weekend in Tennant.... Yesterday we went for a drive to the lookout next to the watertank...wow, you forget how vast this land is when you hang around town all the time... One photo shows a dirt track stretching off into the distance...the next city from here is Alice Springs...which is 5 hours drive away, grin! The other photo is of a lone cloud on the horizon seen from up there...took me a while to realize it was smoke from a bushfire...no wind, not even a breeze, which is why it was it was just collecting there in one huge smoke cloud low on the horizon. Today, after a long lazy breakfast checking my emails, i wandered down the main street to see if any shops were open...past the serpent winding along the wall of the emporium sports store, where the local kids all buy their baggy shirts and shorts...and found a little Aboriginal art gallery called "Desert Rose 21". It's run by a delightful woman called Jenny, who works in the local schools during the week, and...