Did I Ask For Fries?

Tomorrow morning I’m packing my bags and heading to Broken Hill for a fortnight.  I mean that literally because at the moment clothes are strewn all over my bed, but nothing is yet inside my backpack.

I’m lucky enough to be going with a volunteer group doing some Indigenous health checks in some of the communities around BH.  Should be pretty amazing.

Being geographically challenged I looked at a map of NSW today to work out where we are going.  Man it’s a long way away.  We’re driving there as well.  That’s a lot of music to listen to along the way!! 

I may or may not have internet access while I’m away, so if not I will look forward to catching up with the busy world of blogland when I return.  Hopefully I’ll have some cool stories of outback life to share as well!!

Apologies to anyone I may have freaked out with the previous lot of images (especially you Mary!)  I promise the post below includes no guts or gore, and does not harm animals in any way!!!

Right now I feel like this pelican.  I can’t decide whether I’m yawning or excited, but either way it’s a great feeling because I’m officially on holidays – YAY!!!

This is assuming I passed the OSCE that we’ve had over the last 2 days.  I find out next Friday, and I’ll be pretty gutted if I don’t pass.  I feel optimistic about my results, but with some of the stations it’s hard to know if I got enough of the criteria to pass or not – 6 minutes just isn’t long enough (for me anyway!) to take a full developmental, nutritional and paediatric history, or to do a complete cardio exam including peripheral signs, limb pulses, chest and back as well as summarise results!!  Anyway, not much I can do about that now so I’m not going to dwell on it!

Instead I think I’m going to go for a walk.  I have a dentist appointment at 2pm that I’m really not looking forward to, because I already know it’s going to be long and painful and traumatic.  Earlier this year an old filling of mine broke off the side of one of my back molars.  The dentist that repaired it was awful – she spent the entire time bitching at her assistant, while at the same time not doing the best job because there is now a big gap between that tooth and the adjacent one so that food always gets stuck there.  I think I’ve bought about 4 boxes of floss in the last few months.  So I’m getting this filling repaired, and a new one in another tooth.  And yes I am feeling sorry for myself.  I hate my teeth!!!

It doesn’t help that a house across the road is undergoing renovations involving an extremely loud drill that has been going non-stop for the last 45 minutes. The knowledge I will have an actual drill doing much the same thing in my own mouth in the next few hours is quite disturbing.  I need to escape!!!

A and I just booked flights to Egypt. Is that the smartest thing to do on a Saturday night whilst just a leeeetle tipsy?

We leave in 27 days.

Of those 27 days, there are 2 days until my clinical exams, which last for 2 days.  That leaves 23 days.  16 of which I am going to be in Broken Hill.  That leaves 7 days.  2 days of which I will be in da Gong for my brothers graduation.  The remaining 4 days are split between our departure and me starting uni next year.  After our first 3 days of uni, I move to Orange for 4 months.  I’m sure that’s going to require some organisation.

Planning is so not my middle name.

If I fail this exam, and have to come back early I am *screwed*!!!

Since a picture speaks 1000 words, here’s yesterday afternoon in 2,000 words for you.

In case its not easily discernible from the wonderful quality of my phone camera, what we were doing was learning how to suture on pigs feet.  Apparently its the closest thing to mimicing human flesh.  We only learnt one stitch - the interrupted stitch - but even that took me a few goes to get the hang of.  I found the activity quite interesting, and kind of soothing in that it reminded me of the crossstitch and tapestry I used to do when I was younger.

After about an hour in the room with 15 pigs feet I have to say the smell did get a little too much for me though.  The ethics of using dead animals in this way doesn’t really sit easily with me, but at least it is for a more useful purpose than simply eating them.  I don’t eat pork because pigs are one of my favourite animals, and the way most pigs are raised and bred really appalls me.  I’m ashamed to say that at the time I was so interested in learning to suture I didn’t stop to think about, let alone ask where these pigs feet came from and how they were raised.

Next week I will be asking where the pigs came from and suggesting that they source future pigs feet from a cruelty-free farm if they don’t already.

Even though I have no interested in eating pork, I’m also going to email supermarkets and suggests that they do the same.  If you are at all interested in this issue, why don’t you go to savebabe.com and make the Pro Pig Pledge yourself?

Good: 

When you get out of the shower, walk into your room, dry off and put deodorant on.

Bad:

When you decide to place deodorant on your cheek instead of your armpit.

Even worse:

When said deodorant is roll-on, and you cover the whole of one cheek before realising what’s wrong.

 The lesson:

Sometimes you should just go to bed when you’re tired, hygiene be dammed!!

My grandmother is one of the most impressive people that I know.

I remember back in high school I had to write an essay on someone who I admired and I her picked her. If anything, the last 10 years have only increased the admiration I feel for her.

To describe her life story, I’d have to write a book. In fact, she herself has done that, buying an A4 notebook for each of her 6 daughters and filling it with her tale: growing up in a small village in the Ukraine, surviving the war by escaping to Austria then pretending to be Polish in order to be allowed to come to Australia, losing one daughter along the way and finding her 40 years later in Canada via Brazil.

Hearing stories of her life, and even the life my mum led, makes me feel like a spoiled brat. I wasn’t put into prison when as a school-teacher I dared to spank a naughty child. I wasn’t tricked into working for a socialist government by false promises. I was never tattooed on the arm with my prisoner number that remains there 70 years on. I didn’t have to leave my home country one night by sneaking onto a train. I didn’t have to beg a childless couple to pretend one of my daughters was theirs so we would be allowed to enter another country as refugees. I never had to cope with the grief of realising my eldest daughter had been put on a different boat, and not knowing what country she ended up in, or even whether the boat arrived safely.

Neither was I forced to leave school at 14 to look after my 4 younger sisters while my mum had to go to work because my stepfather was a useless drunk. I’ve never had to make all my own clothes for myself and my sisters because I couldn’t afford to buy them. I have never had to go into our backyard to milk my own cow (although I think it would be pretty cool), or to eat the same soup for lunch and dinner practically everyday. Then later I never had to share a small 2 bedroom flat in Sydney with 5 other females and a bathroom so small you can stand in the centre and touch every wall.

With all these circumstances ranging from difficult, to just plain devastating, I look at my mum and my Babushka, and see them as amazingly strong people. It makes me wonder what I would have done, how would I have coped, were I in their shoes. How will I describe my life to my grandchildren should I have any? Will my life be as alien to theirs as my mother and Babas are?

I watched Baba on Saturday, as we walked down the streets of Cabramatta where she lives. At 84 her only complaint is arthritis of the knees, which makes her slow to get up and start walking, but after 15 minutes she is ok. This meant that she linked her arm through mine for balance and support, a gesture which warmed my heart, and yet make me ache with the reality of her mortality. She is still a statuesque woman, but as age takes its toll, at 176cms we are now equal in height.

In the last year the Liverpool government has started a social group for the Slavic eldery women in their municipalty. Every Thursday they bring in speakers who can speak their language, or take them on outings or do some kind of craft. It has literally given my grandmother a new lease on life. She speaks of it with such excitement, how she has started writing poems and making things, how she has bought a camera, and showed me some photos of her group out at the zoo.

One lady who recently joined her group was actually on the same boat out to Australia as my babushka. Until this group formed they had not seen each other for 50 years. When this particular lady was told about the group she asked if there were any other Russian women in the group. The person she spoke to on the phone said that there was a Russian lady and a tall Ukrainian lady. Straight away she asked if the Ukrainian lady’s name was my grandmothers, when answered yes she knew it had to be her.

I wonder how many other size 11-shoed babushkas there are out there in Cabramatta?

So I passed.

Well I *think* I did.  The last 5 digits of my student number were in the word document that got posted at 11am around today.  I hope the last 5 digits of my number aren’t shared by any of the 267 other people in my class.

My celebratory afternoon consisted of:

• hearing a wonderful talk from a man who has lived with HIV for 22 years and going strong
• playing lawn bowls (and thus being able to cross something off my 43 things list)
• drinking too much wine whilst playing lawn bowls
• going out for bruschetta, pizza and sangria, mmmm.  Resisting the gelato.
• going to a pub
• going to a wine bar
• coming home and contemplating whether I will make it to boxing tomorrow morning at 8am. eek!! 

Life is good!! 

So much to write, so little to say.

You know when your mind is so full of all manner of things both good and bad, but one one big scary thought in there crowds everything out?  I have so much going on in my head right now, and several things that I want to work through by blogging, but every time I start my hands get paralysed mid-air above my keyboard and nothing comes out.

Yep, you guessed it, today my exam results are released.  It’s only 8:38am, but for the last hour I have been alternating between checking my email for the dreaded "you failed" email, and hitting refresh on our course homepage to see if they have put up the list of student id’s who have passed yet.  It’s not even 9am, argh.

If I’m going to go to hospital today, I need to leave here at 9:30am.  That’s only a half-hour window for them to post the data.  I don’t like the chances of that happening.

On the other hand there is no way I want to find out my results sitting in a computer room full of other students at hospital.

But can I wait the whole day to find out?  I know some people are not going in today at all.  What if they don’t update us until this afternoon?  I can’t sit here in front of the computer for 5 hours.  It’ll drive me battier than I already am.

I just want to get this news over with, one way or another.  That way I know whether to keep studying for our upcoming clinical exam, or whether to start studying for the theory exam resit instead.

What to do, what to do…