Phileosophie

I love Hollywood and American pop culture and New York because for all their demons they give you an easy reason to live each day and to reach for something grander. They sell hopes and dreams, packaged so convincingly that you buy it over and over again. Almost everytime I feel down, something from Hollywood brings me back and lifts my soul higher. False hopes, maybe, but sometimes it is all you need. Superficial things.

It is so difficult to 'compete' with extraverted people in a world that is so biased towards extraversion. I suppose I could come up with all these theories about how this problem is due to the fact that those evil extraverted folk would obviously be more inclined to force their extraverted ways upon the rest of us and make us feel inferior if we are not like them. I've been having a difficult time this term because my co-intern M is a very outspoken American girl who will fight a battle to its bloody end (even when she is in the wrong) and because I really haven't got the energy, nor desire to do so, I generally throw the towel in and let her win. But it becomes a more practical problem for me when we start to get compared by our registrars because then it starts to impact on my end of term evaluation and the thing is, I'm not saying either of us is better (I truly dont believe that is the case though M probably does) but I think no matter how much work I do, the n...

There are still days when I am grumpy. In fact, it isn't that rare. But there are also more of those days when I am able to remain calm and gracious despite being loaded with more than I can handle. In a way, I guess it is a function of being more comfortable with my role as a doctor, but I hope it is also a sign of growth. Of learning patience and learning when things don't matter. I pray that I will be slow (and then slower!) to anger. I pray that it will be easier to forgive. I pray that there will come a day when I just wouldn't take things personally, and a day when I find myself slowing down , always, to make each moment, with each person count. Being a doctor has given me countless opportunities to learn to relate to other people. To attempt to find something interesting in a person I have no interest in.

I just wanted to say.... THAT I AM MOVING BACK TO SYDNEY! Really happy and excited. I will be based somewhere on the Central Coast, which is about 2 hours from Sydney CBD itself, but it will be great to be closer to my friends and to all that awesome Chinese food again. There are things I will definitely miss about Tasmania, all the awesome friendships I have made in such a quick time. My time in Tasmania has been bitter-sweet, and unfortunately the bitter has made it a little harder to savour the sweet but I am sure that when I am back in good old Sydney I will slowly, in retrospect, come to understand better all the good things I have gained from being here. Next year is going to be interesting - with one half on one side of Asutralia and the other half.. well, I will tell you about that soon. I am also very interested in the possibility of heading to Africa Mercy (part of the Mercy Ships organisation) either in 2014 or 2015 and am looking to see where God leads.

Over the past week I have been on a soul searching journey that has brought me back to the interiors of Borneo (where amazingly there is Wifi). It has been a hectic couple of years and for the most part I have been left feeling lost and uncertain about where I was in life and literally, because despite having a great job in medicine I pretty much have to go where the job takes me. I felt this struggle between fighting for my job, for a good position, in a good program, and keeping what I felt were altruistic intentions about medicine. I struggled with that feeling that life had been quite unfair given how disadvantaged I have been as a result of factors beyond my control (ie. the country of my birth). I felt the pressures of having to do well lest I fail to secure a job n the coming year and risk being sent back to the developing world that I have worked so hard to leave. I gave up a lot of time to do research, half the time convincing myself that I really enjoyed it, and that I was ...

I found this article interesting!  From: http://www.novitatherapeutics.com/blog/werner-forssmann-urologist-nobel-prize-cardiology  I've copied it here in case it gets deleted on the other site one day.  Over the last several years I have become interested in learning where important ideas come from. This interest includes both relatively new ideas, such as ablating sympathetic nerves around the kidney in patients with high blood pressure using a catheter placed in the renal artery, and older ones such as the idea for catheterization itself. Last week I learned about Werner Forssman, who performed the first catheterization of the heart. I would like to share an excerpt from Dr. Forssman’s biography at Angioplasty.org: "In 1929 in a small hospital in Eberswald Germany Werner Forssmann, a young surgical resident, anesthetized his own elbow, inserted a catheter in his antecubital vein and, catheter dangling from his arm, proceeded to a basement x-ray room where he ...

I've just started as the cardiology intern at my hospital and I love it. This week we do not have a registrar due to a lack of staff but it has given me the opportunity to step up and take on some tasks that I won't otherwise have had to do. Some times I feel really stretched and sometimes I get frustrated because I cannot remember what the advanced trainee wants me to do (because a lot of it isn't intuitive yet). But an hour or two out of thr work place and I look back thinking that in those hard moments I've grown. I've inched forward in my understanding of this field that I love so much. I've become a marginally better doctor. And looking back, I love every moment of it. The painful ones, the awkward ones, the extra questions, the nurses that won't leave you alone. Because through all of that I've learnt more, I've grown and I've stepped closer to my future in cardiology.