2 weeks. Rewind.

Revelation of the day...I realise that to maximise self-possession of groceries I can drink straight out of my carton of OJ, and not feel guilty! Hurrah!

Highlights of the past 2 weeks:

1. 12 hour shift with the paramedics.
That's right, I got to sit in with the ambo, sirens blazing, 150km/hr+ down a 60km road, cars parting like Moses and the Dead Sea, out bush retrieving patients. "Sorry about the bumps back there" says Paul, reknown for his wild driving. Guess he doesn't see the smile plastered across my face, I think it's more like a fun theme park ride. First patient we get is a man in.. cue rural sounding name (ok so I've already forgotten but the description we get on the display screen to help = "red Nissan truck + 1 horse"). Needless to say we had to traverse dirt roads, walk out and step over dung, cattle dogs running around. There is a man lying down, covered by the shade of the truck. Apparently he was just about to go up into the hills, herding cattle before he started to vomit blood. He is pale and diaphoretic. There is a patch of grass covered by fresh dark red blood. The medstudent in me thinks "cool, fresh hemetemesis!". Twenty minutes later, IVC in, fluids, 15L O2 and wait for it, he empties his stomach and spews fresh blood all over the back of the ambulance. Back up is called (we are half an hour away from the hospital) but he manages to hang on, goes into resus and the OT. Recurrent esophageal varices haemorrhage secondary to cirrhosis. He's lucky to survive. The rest of the shift goes slowly, an elderly woman stuck on the toilet, heading into the Kapooka army base (complete with golf course + cinema! plus kangaroos) before the night time psych cases. There is an 18yr old girl handcuffed on the lawn, policeman nearby. Attempted suicide, mum and brother with bipolar. The inside of the house is a maelstorm. Then another young 16yo boy, OD-ed on his antidepressants due to a fight with the girlfriend. It's been a decent shift and I see how the psych patients can open up during the ambo ride to the hospital, before the bright lights, busy doctors, busy nurses, and general hustle and bustle of the ED wards. It's times like these when I feel old (yes really), when you see patients as young as your siblings with their whole lives ahead wanting attention to help them. And its seeing this that I keep it in mind to try and not to be the type of doctor that will see "18yo girl, suicide attempt" and roll their eyes, sigh and think "another psych case".

2. FOOD
You knew this was coming! Wednesday afternoon, the patient I was looking up is taken away to get radiotherapy at the private. What to do? Productive procrastination of course (aka baking). There is Close the Gap for Thursday morning tea and I nominate myself to be SexyLady's sous chef. 3 hours later, 40 or so carrot cupcakes with lemon frosting and lime zest, 1 chocolate vegan cake with coffee ganache and 1 vegan lime cheesecake..back to the wards to finish off with that patient. Perfect.


Miss Lovely P's vegan lime cheesecake with blueberries - Crowdpleaser!


Goodies on show. Confession...I had 7 cupcakes + 1 sneaky melting moment for morning tea, lunch and afternoon tea!


Mr NextTopModel with the baking maestros :)

A brief tangent - Smith recipe of the week - Spinach, Pine Nut lasagne with 3 different types of cheese! (was meant to be 4, but couldnt locate the Gorgonzola here *shakes fist in air)


Lasagne - which sticking true to the student lifestyle I ate for 4 days then realised that it might be a good idea to throw the rest out...

3. Friday Night Outs
So with 3 houseparties under my belt, the pros of wagga night life:

* If its not within walking distance, then it might as well be another town.
All the houseparties were closer than my primary school to my home - crazy! Crazier still is the proximity of the main street with the pubs and clubs from your doorstep (<10 minutes). Perfect for the Walk of Shame back (no, not THAT type of Shame...the Shame when you find out you're one of the last patrons at the bar 3am in the morning type of shame!)

* You can get away wearing a leopard print dress with CROCS on
Yes I know, they are hideous and can cause temporary blindness but in my defense, they fit in with the houseparty theme "wild".


Only in wagga.

* You can get away with no ID, no cash and CROCS in a Wagga Club - tried and tested!
However, I wouldnt recommend it unless you have a liking for WEIRD men to come up and start touching your crocs?! That's a new one.

* You can get away with no ID and an ED admission - not tried and tested yet
So I forgot to bring my ID and cash (in the midst of getting ready I thought I didn't need it). And I was right. When you're walking distance from the ED, know the intern in ED and have the regs and other interns at the houseparty..I think you're more than covered!

* You can pull out a home-grown zucchini and have it entertain your house full of guests


The questionable steroid driven monster of a zucchini!

The cons being:

* You basically have the same work, home, social group.
As much as I love them, I'm spending more time with them than I ever did with my own family!! Woah.

* To realise the above point before doing anything stupid and showing your face on the Monday ward round.


Excited for the Easter week break to Sydney!!!!!!!!!!!!

Becoming diabetic.

Apologies for my tardiness - when you spend a fortnight in Griffith, a weekend in Sydney and then back to Wagga you start to feel like a D-grade Getaway crewmember and of course overlook your blogging commitments. That said, I still have to work on "packing lightly". I will achieve this by the end of this year (I promise!).

Anyhows, I love my weekend sneaky trips back to Sydney. With the limited time, I find I tend to try and make the most of it (as opposed to the usual bumming around I'd do given I was still in Sydney). It also helps greatly that everyone seems to make it special and an effort to meet up even though I'm only a couple of hours away and still in the same state (hehe thanks guys! though this effect seems to be wearing off on my family *hint* =p). My recent trip back also reaffirmed a great weakness of mine - food. Some girls get high on designer bags, some people on illicit substances, I think I can get high on good food and can honestly confess that you can seriously get orgasmically high on foodporn (sometimes I feel like the dogs in Pavlov's experiments that salivate whenever they heard the bell ring signalling FOOD is coming!). And secret, if you ever manage to get on my wrongside (though this will be a feat in itself), everything will be forgiven with good food (kind of like how oxytocin makes women forget the pain of labour so they'd be willing to go through it all over again). Maybe I should stop here. But no, I'll go on.

So I went to 3 sweet shops (+1 Asian dessert place) on the weekend. A late night catchup session at our local haunt Tea Inn over their drinks&desserts, a visit back to La Renaissance tucked in a cute cobbly alleyway in the Rocks, a visit to Guylian cafe an hour after (...with more cake, all onus on my dining companion!) and lastly to Black Star in Newtown. I guess the magic of food for me is the ability for every little part of me to get consumed by one bite of something divine. And divine can be the intense sweet bitter dark hot chocolate when outside its pouring, grey and miserable as in Guylian. Or when you find a heavenly composition of food elements like the Strawberry, Watermelon, Rose water cake from Black Star:


Our goodies on the nifty cardboard tables


Close up of the watermelon, strawberry, rosewater cake


With Tepi who recently gained 5kg from her stint in Tokyo but has managed to lose it again, Biggest Loser has nothing on you Tep. Can you tell how happy I am? Wish I could have had both but am proud to say I behaved and stuck to my share.

Now this stuff can be classified as dangerous. Dangerous because it is deceptively light, refreshing and I could eat a whole cake and still want more:


Deconstruction? More like destruction.

It doesn't help that the chocolate caramel tart gives an amazing caramel - not sickeningly sweet but just the right shade of salty dark mellow sweetness:


Foodporn chomp chomp


Ginga Ninja makes a surprise appearance!

And what about the Delia Smith challenge? Well, I'm happy to share that I've held my first mini-pseudo-dinner party (with help of course from Delia Smith). I'm also happy to share the secret of dinner parties, i.e. to reveal the menu when the guests arrive thus compensating for any surprising turns during the cooking process ;) (though rest assure there were no big dramas like how one reg cooked rabbit the week before and managed to inflict gastroenteritis upon himself!)


Baked Canelloni with salad - we upped Delia by making the sheets from scratch rather than cheat with lasagne sheets!


Spiced apple pecan cake with ice cream and honey

Now with every good thing there must also be a downside (I know this is unlike me to focus on the negative but this is reality right, and I have to face the facts). Thus, with all this good food, I have come to the ugly truth that I might be nurturing a foodbaby. I'd say mine's 1-2months gestation, named Peaches. Feel free to pat. I wonder if resorting to a typical student diet i.e. mie goreng 7days straight but for me I'll stick to cereal morning, day and night will do me any favours? Hmm.

And to give some hope that there is decent food in the country, here's Josh with some pizza we got from Mama Rosa in Griffith.



My other remaining task is to find a decent Chinese joint out here. Though admittedly I don't have high hopes for this one.

And if you managed to read all this, then please redeem a hug from me next time you see me!

A day tour around Griffith!

One big pro of having a short placement out to a country town like Griffith, with no assessments and a house to yourself (with housekeeper included!) is treating it just as you would an elective holiday.

So, after our week's worth of hard work, Hannah (a Liverpool student posted here for a month) and I decide to cut our Friday surgery commitments short and do some exploring. Of course, you could consider this an investment on the hospital part to garner a greater fondness for the town from potential future employees... and hence our following daytime activity can be more correctly classified as the Socio-cultural learnings of the Griffith Community:

1. Cottage Art Gallery
- Our first stop, a little cottage showcasing the works of local and regional artisans.
- The friendliness of locals is evident when a lady sitting down at a table sipping her coffee sees us and introduces herself as Veronica, an Indigenous Wiradjuri artist based in Albury. She then proceeds to lead us up the back of the cottage to the roof/attic to reveal other pieces of her artwork created by local sand, bark and multimedia.


A sneaky shot of Han and I on one of Veronica's paintings

- Before we go, she gets us to jot down our contact details to invite us to her exhibition that will take place in a Paddington gallery later this year. We promise that we'd attend.

2. Italian Heritage Museum / Pioneer Park
- A brief stopover. Basically a park telling the story of the Murrumbidgee Irrigation Area. Reminded me back to the days where we'd have primary school excursions to the goldfield of Bathurst and the likes.


With one of the said Pioneer Houses.

3. Hermit's Cave & Scenic Hill Lookout
- We drive up the road to a place called Scenic Hill, the highest point in Griffith where apparently you can look out and see the hills of Adelaide as everything is so flat!


The views from Scenic Hill, note: all that greenery are grape trees in straight little rows.

- 2 city girls, sandals and 1 dress. Doing it rough climbing rocks and hiking through shrubbery to get to the hermit's cave and chapel.


Han in front of the Hermit's main cave

Story goes that the Scenic Hill Hermit was a man disillusioned and disgusted with humanity, after being conned twice of all his possessions and given empty promises of work, walked following the Murrumbidgee river until he reached the early fruit farms of Griffith. Here he decided he would settle and began constructing a stone wall, sleeping quarters and kitchenspace from the cliff-face. What followed were interconntecting stone pathways, galleries, gardens and other caves which he would retreat into when people came.


Part of the hermit's chapel (yes more rocks)


The formidable rocks we conquered!


My obligatory shot with some rocky country landscape


My little car parked on the dirtroads here.

4. Westend Winery


- The naughtiest thing I've done recently (more like ever).
- We figured it wouldn't be a true tour of Griffith without a visit to a winery. Consequently, though still on my green Ps, I enjoyed partaking in some wine tasting (a swirl around the palate and spit back out of course, definitely not the imbibing part).

5. Banna St, Griffith's main street
- It's amazing to find that we've only spent 3hours doing all the above. What seems some distance on the map, always turns out to be five minutes away.
- So we decide to spend the remainder of the day down Griffith's main strip; every country town will have a main street where you'll find everything you need and inevitably bump into everyone at the same time.
- It is a delightful surprise to find some boutique designer stores (!) and great shopping (2 tops, a skirt and pants!), little quaint shops like the one below.


The Old Belahlee, cute little country-style trinkets galore. Note the old people love on the side hehe <3


Teddies in Chinese attire? Quirky!

- The heavy Italian migrant influence makes for some very decent coffee in Griffith (hooray!). Needless to say, we spent the remainder of afternoon enjoying Italian biscotti, drinks and people-watching ;)

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Leaving you with some interesting points on Griffith:

* 70% of NSW wine is grown here - this includes Cassella wines which is world famous for its Yellowtail range

* 70% of the total NSW citrus product comes from this region

* 95% of Australia's rice is produced in these regions

* Bartter Enterprises Pty Ltd from around here is Australia's 2nd largest producer of chicken meat - think Steggles!

* Griffith was designed by Walter Burley Griffin, the Chicago architect who received worldwide acclaim in 1912 after winning the competition for the design of Canberra. Hence the distinctive radial pattern featuring in both Griffith and Canberra.

And because of the considerable agricultural nature of this place, I always find it a laugh when I ask people for their address at the clinic and they respond with a "Farm 321 so-and-so road, country-sounding town".