It’s Friday night. My candles are burning low, my room smells of the orange blossom I picked earlier when I was out on a walk. It’s spilling out of a glass jar on my mock fireplace. I’m working tomorrow, so tonight is a night to be cosy and calm. Leftover chilli and kale, nostalgic music, texting with any friends who are awake. If I wasn’t writing I’d be reading. Mellow evenings are my jam.
I flew out here with a 25kg piece of hold luggage and a rucksack that felt as though it were made of lead. It seemed like a lot at the time, but I still had to make a last minute purge of things that didn’t fit. My yoga mat, journals, candles gifted by friends, fridge poetry magnets and postcards made the cut. The medical textbooks didn’t.
(I don’t regret that decision in the slightest).
If you have ever sent me any kind of card there is a very good chance it is currently on my wall. For real. Postcard art has been my aesthetic since I was about 14. Partly because I have lived in so many different places in that time – literally somewhere different every few months, at max every year. There is nothing quite like losing your belongings to storage and living out of boxes you know you’re going to have to repack in just a few months’ time to put you off buying or owning anything at all. Sometimes I joke that the day I graduate to real art will be the day I know I have truly become a real settled-down adult.
But also it just makes me so happy to be surrounded by reminders of the people I love and places in which I’ve been happy.
Forever trying to spread the old-fashioned Christmas/postcard/just-because-card love. I’m not so good at birthday cards. That parental pressure to craft them for siblings and family members as a kid gave me a bit of a complex. Ha.
It’s been three weeks since I last wrote. Seems like a good time to pick up where I left off, share a lil more, do a lil more scrapbooking. Hope you enjoy reading along <3
I survived my first set of New Zealand nights. I had an absolutely terrible set of night shifts in my first year of medicine and ever since then I get almost irrationally anxious just before starting a new set. Even though it’s invariably fine once they begin. It’s such a weird thing to be alone in a hospital at night. Big empty corridors and dark wards, and nursing stations with midnight snacks (and a pile of charts that need warfarin prescribing). But you get to run around and be your own boss a little bit more, just working through a list of jobs and responding to calls from the ward, and if you’re rostered on with a good team of people it can be pretty fun.
In my hospital there are three house officers and two registrars on the medical team overnight, which is a smaller team than I’m used to, covering a much bigger hospital. The regs tend to stay in the Emergency Department and “clerk”, which basically means seeing all the new patients who are referred in by ED or by GPs. One of them will review sicker patients on the wards as required. One of the house officers also clerks, the other two work through the ward jobs. We switched things up so that we all got to do some clerking and some ward cover.
It was my first time clerking since I’ve gotten here. I like being “on the take”, as we call it, and I got to see some really interesting cases. The patient population is so different to those that I’ve previously worked with and although that’s obvious during the day, you kind of get used to it pretty quickly. It’s really apparent though when you’re admitting someone say who’s come in with a stroke, and going through their medical history you realise that they’ve got type two diabetes and a heart bypass and kidney failure and gout and are MRSA-and-ESBL-colonised and they’re only thirty six. That’s genuinely not an exaggeration. People have so many conditions that are considered “preventable”, and at such a young age. A lot of patients seem to present quite late too, and in my hospital a lot come over from “The Islands”, where they’ve received very little medical care. I’ve seen pathology over here that I would never have imagined seeing in a first world country.
I have so many observations about the New Zealand medical health system, but it feels kind of unfair to share many of them at this stage, because I’ve not really worked for long enough or in enough different places to say what’s specific to my current hospital and what’s representative of the system as a whole.
At a very superficial level though, one of my favourite things about my current hospital is the poster culture. There are waaaay more posters on the wards than anywhere I’ve ever worked, almost as though anyone who has anything to say just puts one up. They vary from things like motivational quotes and prayers, to memes and the blindingly obvious. Sometimes I think instead of just telling someone something they’ll decide to make a poster with their message. Quite often I’ll walk past a ward clerk’s desk and find them designing one on their computer, ready to print off and stick up somewhere on the ward. I’m a massive fan. These kind of things make for easy entertainment in all workplaces, but I’m loving some of the ones I’ve come across here. I’ve started a collection on my phone – although sadly I don’t have pictures of many of the best ones.
In terms of the day job, now that I’m halfway(!!) through this three month run already(!!!!), I’m feeling a lot more settled. I still cause unintentional distress to the nurses by prescribing things like Trimethoprim 200mg BD (they give 300mg nocte here and don’t have 100 or 200mg tablets), or asking them to give Paracetamol IV (somehow just not a thing), or trying to discharge someone on Movicol (which apparently requires special authority to prescribe!!). But I’m learning! Haha. And I’ve gotten better at the regular drugs (Metoprolol instead of Bisoprolol, Cilazapril instead of Ramipril, etc etc).
As I said before, I find renal medicine really interesting. It’s a great job, with some really good teaching, and I feel like I’ll be so much more confident managing renal patients when I’m done. One of the registars on the team came over from the UK a few years ago, and quite apart from it just being really nice to work with a fellow Brit, it’s been a lifesaver having her able to give me pointers about things that are done differently here and things I should look out for. Everyday run-of-the-mill conditions, such as atrial fibrillation, or COPD, can be managed quite differently here to in the UK, and it doesn’t help that there aren’t really any hospital guidelines in the same way as I’ve been used to in the British hospitals where I worked and trained. Some days I feel so overwhelmed trying to figure out why people are being managed in a particular way, and sometimes I do things the way I would in the UK only to be met with bemusement and see my plans crossed out and changed to something completely different. It’s difficult, and sometimes I feel so stupid or embarrassed, but it’s forcing me to go back to the basics of medicine to understand why things are done differently, and has also made me much more aware that there are so many different ways to approach things. It’s definitely making me a better physician. And at the end of the day, that’s what I want most.
Home is sweet, especially now that I’m more moved in and I’ve got all my cards up on my wall. It’s a pretty run-down rickety old house, but I’m used to those, and my flatmates (“flatties”) are the best. I’m not around as much as I’d like just because of my antisocial work schedule, but I love when we’re all chillin in the living room with the fire lit, eating dinner together or watching Netflix. None of them are doctors, which is nice, because you need non-medics in your life to remind you what a normal working schedule should look like and to keep you sane. They’re doing their best to do that! Haha.
I’m still having so much fun just being here in New Zealand. As someone who’s always been fascinated with language, one of my favourite things over the past few weeks has been trying to zero in on particularly Kiwi-phrases. At the moment I’m obsessed with the way they say “eh”/”ay”. I had no idea this was a thing (is that just me?? I knew Canadians are big on it, but Kiwis?!), but I love it. It sounds really informal to me, and yet it’s used pretty readily in conversation at work that is otherwise relatively formal. (This might not be the case in general or in other workplaces- as I said, I’m still trying to figure it out. I’m also not very tuned in to different Kiwi accents yet, so perhaps it’s more typical of some backgrounds than others). It doesn’t really translate to anything we have in British English. It can mean “huh?” or “isn’t it?”, as in “that’s his pen, eh?”, but it also has completely different functions. As I was leaving work today I heard someone tell a friend “I’ve never had a Crispy Creme donut eh”, which was definitely a statement, not a question. And it also seems to be used as a filler mid-sentence – as in: “How was your weekend?” “Oh it was cool eh, I just took things easy”. I probably spend about ten percent of my day repeating these kind of sentences in my head over and over, trying to get a feel for how and when it’s used. Which some of my friends (ahem Seham) will probably mock me endlessly for. But there you go. Haha. My lil linguist brain loves it.
Another thing that I’m loving is the way Spring is arriving. It’s definitely a lot warmer already overnight (our house doesn’t have central heating and isn’t insulated, so you definitely notice!), and the trees on my street that were bare just a few weeks ago have blossomed and turned green so fast! I reckon that has something to do with how much rain we’ve had – and while I’m on the subject of that, I legit will not stand for any Kiwi telling me that they’d never live in the UK because of the weather because jaysus I’ve seen more rain here in the past few weeks than I did the whole past year in Gloucestershire! And I swear that’s supposed to be one of the areas of the UK with the most rainfall! It’s all good though, it’s still glorious when the sun shines. And every day I’m so glad I chose to live in this neighbourhood. Newmarket has a couple of busy roads and my street backs off one of them. But as I wrote in my last blog, the moment I turn the corner and reach my street it feels like I’m in the countryside. There’s green and flowers everywhere, and the birdsong is so loud. When it’s been a long day, and I’m feeling fractious and frazzled, stepping away from the city literally feels like dropping a weight from my shoulders.
Probably one of the most challenging things for me at the moment is balance. Which, well, when is it ever not an issue? I’m really glad I’ve taken this time to get some extra experience before applying and committing to a training program, because there are still so many things that I’m trying to figure out just in terms of what I want to achieve at work and in life, and personal priorities. I really, really love medicine, and I honestly couldn’t imagine doing anything different these days. I had no idea what it would be like back when I was applying to med schools (those days feel so long ago now!), and I feel so lucky all the time that I somehow stumbled into it.
With that said, there are so many other things that I love too, and most jobs as a doctor leave you with so little spare time. The rotas are antisocial, and the amount of hours of your own time that you have to put in studying for exams (for SO MANY years after you’ve qualified), or working on audits or research papers, or reading up on cases etc is insane. It’s not even that I dislike doing such things – for sure some of it can be tedious, but a lot is actually pretty interesting – it’s just that sometimes you just want to be a normal human being and chill out and spend time with family and friends, you know? Traditionally people in the UK who have wanted more of a work/life balance have gone into General Practice, but I worked a GP job and it didn’t really seem to me that the hours were any less long or stressful (on the contrary). Yes, there aren’t any night shifts and there aren’t necessarily weekends – and that’s not a small thing. But it definitely didn’t seem like a straightforward solution to me, and that’s before you even get into the actual differences between community medicine and hospital medicine (which are many).
Since working here my mind has been on the issue a lot. I’ve always been happy to make short term sacrifices for long term gain, but I feel like I’ve done my time in that respect with med school already. I’m not prepared to exclusively give my life over to medicine while training, there are other things equally important to me. So it’s good to work a busy rota to get a better idea of what is and isn’t acceptable to me, and it’s good to work in a different system to see how different training programs work so that I know what options are out there.
At the moment (apart from trying to work through that conundrum – send me your advice on a postcard) the challenge is fitting everything in around my current rota and trying to manage my energy levels and find some kind of peace. It’s tricky, because (for the reasons I touched upon above), there are so many days that I feel the need to come home from work and just read up on things to fully understand what I am seeing and doing. Most days I don’t get round to it, and my list just grows longer. Some days I feel so exhausted from the effort of taking in so much new stuff, and so overwhelmed by how much more there always is to learn, that I just come home and crash. I’ve spent most of my free time at the weekends or in the evening hanging out with my flatmates or other UK medics, which is great, but I’m such an introvert, and I’m definitely feeling the lack of quiet alone-time. I seem to have had so little time to myself – and yet if I do forgo a pub quiz or weekend day trip I’m overcome by a sense of FOMO, like I should be out there making the most of everything New Zealand has to offer. So I’m working on trying to appease that.
It’s hard as well not being able to talk to people as much as I would like. I talk a lot with my close friends and family; my mind is always racing, and I’m always craving a sounding board. They’re definitely one of my biggest sources of support when I’m struggling or trying to process things, but it’s also really important to me to feel connected with them when there are things going on in their lives, and to be able to just share the mundane basics of what is going on in mine. But there’s really only my Saturday and Sunday mornings that work out (UK Friday and Saturday eves) and I’ve barely managed to speak to my family at all. My grandfather, my Dziadzius, had a stroke a few weeks ago, and then developed a bad urine infection. It’s been really isolating feeling so far away from him and the family and not really being able to even properly talk to anyone about it. That’s the price you pay for moving to the other side of the world, but still. It’s hard.
So one of the things I’m so glad I’ve found a way to keep up is my yoga. I only started yoga back in April, but it’s had such a profound impact on my life in the past few months. When I first joined a studio back in Cheltenham on a 30 day trial I was grieving and broken from a number of difficult things that had happened over the course of the preceding months. I didn’t think of myself as a “yoga person”, but I was literally looking for anything that would bring me some kind of comfort and relief. It ended up being so much more than that, to the extent that when I was preparing to leave Cheltenham, I was really scared at the thought of how I would cope without it. I didn’t have any faith that home practices would help me. It felt like I’d found a treatment that had perfectly addressed all of my problems, even ones I hadn’t fully acknowledged, yet there I was choosing to walk away from it, and what if I never found my way back again?
Thankfully that hasn’t been the case. I’ve discovered a different kind of release in home practice and finally, last week, I joined a studio. I signed up for a seven day trial during my week of nights (the shifts are only ten hours here, so you have a few more hours to play with), and on the Sunday before going to work I did a Yin Candlelight class and it was everything I needed. I still really really miss the atmosphere at Ella and Fleur, and my Cheltenham instructors and especially my Thursday night class with Charlotte – I remain highly skeptical that I’ll ever find any class with as good energy and playlists ever again – but I’m exploring new practices and poses and flows, and it feels good.
There were a few more things I thought I might write about, but it’s now Monday evening (candles still lit, finished the last of the chilli for dinner tonight), and I think it’s time to bring this post to a close. I have a few things in the works that I’m excited for, and excited to share with you all soon.
Gonna leave it here for now.
With love,
Z x
– Nesting, (but preparing to fly).
Mad to Live 
You have such a way with words, thank you for sharing <3
(I also loved the pic of the play station controller haha)
hahaha – I’m so proud of my new play controller skills! however basic. <3