Sunday Transitions

As I sit on my flight to Melbourne, New Zealand bound by the end of the day, I thought it was an opportune time to reflect on my last five weeks in Adelaide. Five weeks ago, when I stepped foot in the Women’s and Children’s Hospital for the first time, and my supervisor asked me why I chose Paediatric Surgery for my placement, and what I wanted to get out of my five weeks, my answer was simply that I loved working with children but that I’d had merely a half day in Paediatric surgery through my previous medical education. Did I have any aspirations to be a surgeon? Not really. (but of course I didn’t tell them that, to them my “options were still open”). So I began this journey in Paediatric Surgery, enjoying standing in theatre watching these tiny humans, watching the baby with a congenital duodenal atresia have its intestinal tract restored, or an umbilical hernia be repaired. I got to see the compassionate and highly skilled way the anaesthetists interacted with childre...

One of the great things here in Adelaide has been the low-key relaxed environment of the operating theatre. In New Zealand theatres, you’d occasionally hear the soft murmuring of a radio station playing as you work, and its typical for light hearted conversation to occur, but here in Adelaide, every theatre is equipped with iPhone speaker docks to enable every surgeon’s personalized choice of music to reverberate through the theatre. One of the consultants didn’t provide his own music, but it was well expected of any registrar, resident or medical student to not enter his theatre without the music that he liked. What was that music you ask? Beyoncé. When we were in theatre with him one morning, he asked for some music, and we had limited Beyoncé between us. I started playing the limited Beyoncé I had, and “We Run This World” started playing. “Who is this?” The surgeon asked shocked. Informed that it was in fact Beyoncé, and he was again s...

I thought today I would write a little bit about differences . For the non-medical among you, I apologise if there are words or concepts that don’t mean anything to you – skip over it and we’ll be back to your regular scheduled programming next (or read on, and as I heard so delightfully from Lily – you might learn a new word or phrase!!) Coming to a new country, with a different medical system there are bound to be differences in the way medicine is practiced and the procedures and systems in place. Even Australia, in all its similarities to New Zealand is bound to have a few differences. In amongst the chaos of finishing exams, packing up and moving somewhere new however, I somehow managed to forget this simple fact. It was probably my second day of ward rounds when I was reminded of this. We were seeing yet another patient with appendicitis who was scheduled for surgery. “…And he’s got IV Tazocin going?” the consultant asked, as a final remark. “TAZOCIN?!?!?!?!” I excla...