Still working on the language

Discovered a few days ago, that when a patient is described as "average" - where not talking about the arithmetic mean. "Average" in Aussie seems to me right at the bottom of the barrel. OK, so that explains why the patient always seemed to look a bit worse than me.

Walking home tonight, beautiful clear night and I realized that the sky still has no constellations that I recognize. Where did that big dipper go?

There's a mountain bike race this Sunday - 3 man teams to do as many laps as possible in 3 hours. One of our nurses is the president of the Mtn Bike Club putting it on, and came rushing back from the triage desk today with the great news that she had found me a mountain bike to use and a team to ride on! One of her friends, just about my size, was out in triage with a broken clavicle - so his bike and spot on a team was mine. Should be fun.

Continue to get interesting cases: guy went to Fiji for a diving holiday, came back with abdominal pain, constipation, and fever. Pretty sure that it's typhoid - don't recall diagnosing that before.

As I get to know the system better (and, the system and more importantly, the people in the system, get to know me) it works a bit better. No place for nursing orders, but post-its work really well. Have to call radiologist to get approval for CT, etc after hours - but, as long as you're half-way reasonable they always try to help - even though the available resources don't allow exactly what you want. Today, I even asked for a CT (Easter Tuesday is a holiday in Tassie - so we're on part staffing) and was told that an MR would be better (which I knew) and he'd just do that instead (the MR and CT techs are cross trained, so once a tech is in, both studies are fine).

Getting to know the other specialty Registrars better, also. And that smooths interactions quite a bit.

I've had the distinct impression that Emergency Med is a second class citizen/overpaid intern sort of attitude here. But, part of the problem, I suspect is that there is so much turnover in EM, that nobody gets to know the capabilities in the ED and it isn't to unreasonable to assume the worst. Until they get the resources, and permanent staff, I expect it won't much change.