The Adventure Continues...

Rants, raves and random observations from an itinerant epidemiologist.

  
100 in 1000
  1. Spend a week up a mountain learning to ski
  2. Visit Karoline's place in Moravia
  3. Hold a conversation in Czech (only)
  4. Drink 500ml of each of the following beers:
    1. Pilsner
    2. Staroprammen
    3. Budvar
    4. Velke Popovice
    5. U Fleku
    6. Gambrinus
    7. Krusovice
  5. Respond to at least one GOARN request (WHO and MSF are also acceptable)
  6. Travel across the Atlantic
  7. Return to South America
  8. Read a book to, or with, an impressionably aged child
  9. Participate in one NanoWriMo Challenge and come within at least 10,000 words of the goal length
  10. Have my nose pierced
  11. Have my next tattoo drawn
  12. Purchase the perfect jeans (x 2 pairs)
  13. Attend a spin class 3 times a week for 8 consecutive weeks
  14. Bake Viv's cheesecake
  15. Make David's casserole
  16. Make David's Chicken Cashew-nut Stirfry
  17. Invite 4 people who don't know one another too well to dinner
  18. Ride from Vienna to Venice on a motorbike (pillion acceptable, those less desirable)
  19. Attend a book group for at least two books
  20. Go on a choir weekend (learn and perform difficult piece in two/three days)
  21. Visit Madame Tussaud's (in London)
  22. Take an architecture appreciation course
  23. Join an all-girl group and sing a solo
  24. Publish in a scientific journal (top two authors)
  25. Cook a duck or other 'waterfowl'.
  26. Locate the Al-Timimi's from Doha Veterinary Practise
  27. Have a pedicure
  28. Maintain a Brazilian (ouch) for three months.
  29. Find a trustworthy Czech hairdresser
  30. Treat my inner-6-year-old twice a week (at least)
  31. Do the liver-cleansing diet properly (12 weeks)
  32. Don't eat out for one month
  33. Find a flat and flatmate
  34. Purchase one Joseph sweater
  35. Purchase one of the following pairs of designer shoes (they MUST also be COMFORTABLE, and be able to be worn with 4 different outfits and 2 types of occasion): Jimmy Choos, Manolo Blahniks, Christian Louboutin (Ebay or 2nd hand are acceptable)
  36. Send 5 books to the booksphere and track them.
  37. Go hanggliding
  38. Read 10 'classic' books (from 1001 Books to Read before you Die)
    1. Moll Flanders
    2. Everything is illuminated
    3. Madam Bovary
    4. Zen & the Art of Motorcycle Maintainance
    5. Catch-22
    6. Odysseus
    7. On the Road
  1. Run (non-stop!) for 5kms outside (preferably in a street race thingy)
  2. Send Christmas Cards on time
  3. Make a collage/mural out of street lights on my wall
  4. Buy a bed, build it, and sleep soundly in it
  5. Go to Africa
  6. Host an 'event' (classified as and when)
  7. Organise a 30th Birthday Party
  8. Wear a costume
  9. Sing on stage
  10. Buy a painting that evokes memories of Prague (cannot involve queues!)
  11. Learn a god-damned card game that stays in my memory (other than fish/snap)
  12. See sunrise. Be sober. Have woken for it. Excludes months Nov-Mar
  13. Take a walk and flip coins at each intersection
  14. Win something
  15. Draft a will
  16. Take a roadtrip
  17. Go to Italy already
  18. Sea Kayak around Abel Tasman Park (NZ)
  19. Get plants
  20. Take a train to another Eastern European Destination (accession countries are acceptable) alone preferably.
  21. Get UK to give me a provisional motorcyclists license and simultaneously get a 'card' license.
  22. Go SCUBA diving again - at least two dives lasting 30mins each.
  23. Go to a dentist. *sigh*
  24. Do a Czech Wine Trail. And live to tell the tale
  25. Make an 'outbreak emergency kit'.
  26. Go to bed prior to 11pm every night (inc weekends) for four consecutive weeks.
  27. Marvel over lack of tiredness
  28. Dine at a Gordon Ramsey restaurant (or Nobu)- preferably for free.
  29. Bet on the nags
  30. Do something for charity (applying and getting a 'red card' will count)
  31. Walk along the Champs Elysee
  32. Do 100 sit ups in a row
  33. Do 50 pressups (arms in tight)
  34. Make branston pickle (or nearest substitute)
  35. Cook something 'new' and 'adventurous' at least once a month
  36. Find a mentor
  37. Be a mentor
  38. Learn what mentoring is all about
  39. Meet an online person in real life
  40. Resist the flirt. Once. Just one night. It's okay if people don't immediately succumb to my natural charm. Really it is.
  41. Spend time at a spa (spa towns in the CR don't count)
  42. Send a care package to someone
  43. Get a Tata Bojs CD
  44. Take a French/German/Dutch course and SPEAK THE DAMNED LANGUAGE WHEN I HAVE THE OPPORTUNITY EVEN THOUGH IT MAKES ME SOUND LIKE AN IDIOT!
  45. Order new contact lenses.
  46. Make a list of things I take with me when I pack for different occasions
  47. Eat lobster. Prepared by someone else.
  48. Back up the blog
  49. Put everything onto an external hard drive
  50. Find a DDR mat and console and 'dance, I say dance!'�
  51. Go to the beach and lie on the warm sand. For an hour. (with sunscreen on, natch)
  52. Take and complete a course in either: Tango, Salsa or Flamenco
  53. Join the Municipal Library of Prague
  54. Move to another country
  55. Go to a live concert of a band I actually like
  56. Pay off debts (student loan excl.)
  57. Send thank you cards for every gift I receive (other than the gift of happiness, blah blah blah).
  58. Get an agent (literary or theatre)
  59. Go to a sports bar without cringing, by personal choice
  60. Ride a rollercoaster
  61. Hold a snake
  62. Spend a day wandering around a museum (not art gallery!)
Slow day at the hospital?
Tuesday 3 July 2007
So, they reckon that some of the peeps involved (did I really just write peeps? I blame my overly long fingernails *note to self*, personally, they keep sliding all over the keys. But, I digress...) in that whole London-car-bomb-thing-which-didn't-thankfully-explode-
due-to-the-exemplary-work-done-by-the-towies-in-London-town turned out to possibly be doctors.

See, here's the way it goes: you go to Med School, in whichever country you so happen to be in. Then you attempt to go to another (usually more 'developed') country, to give your family a better life/start/payment scheme - whatever. You arrive in that country and find out that your Medical degree is deplorably giggled at in the new country. You're a little angsty, but you take a job as a supermarket pusher of trolleys (this happened to a friend of mine) and eventually sit their convoluted 'registration' exams to prove that you know how to use a sphygmomonometer (YES!! Pub quiz!!!) or, jumpy spider thing as Eddie might say, and can do the two fingers held on the belly, two fingers tap on the first two fingers thing to 'listen'. If you can rub someone's torso or underarm and 'palpate' something, so much the better. Off to a Dr's clinic with you, oh, and don't forget to make your signature illegible to radiologists and pharmacists.

But life is dull. All you see day in, day out, are the complications of living life in the lap of luxury. You're no longer scheduled for a rotation in the ED (emergency department, for all those non-medics of us). You stick swabs up people's penises (at least, in countries where you don't have to be a specialist to do so), rectums and down their throats (different swabs, one fervently hopes). You scrape cells from cervixes (cervixii?), cheeks, abssesses, and if you're in the antipodes, you might have the opportunity for a little mole-removal 'surgery'. But for the most part, it's not the disease-ravaged, war-torn stuff that you dealt with at med school. There are no tsunami's, or landslides, or buses with a capacity of 48 that carry 134 across ravines before collapsing a bridge.

So, you think to yourself, how can I liven this up a bit? What can I do to make things a little more...I KNOW!!! Incendiary devices!!! YES! That's it! What a plan.

I reckon it's because we all use (and then mis-use, but that's another entry) antibiotic EVERYTHING. If I see another person hold up the 'antibacterial' version of a hand soap/fairy liquid/bench spray, and comment (in any language) to their shopping partner (who often looks about as bored to death as I feel) "ooh, this'll make the place much cleaner!" I swear to god, I shall pummel them, right then and there in the supermarket aisle (19, in Eden Tescos - yep, some of you might've thought there was nowt but pretty things and snakes and apple trees in Eden, but lo, we've got Tescos). Because it doesn't make the place cleaner folks. It just breeds bacteria that engineer THEMSELVES (lets not start the GE debate today) to be resistant to that antibacterial liquid you thought would 'protect' your family. That is, WORSE, FAR worse, than the ones you've already got merrily colonising your kitchen cloth.

So, when people DO come to the hospital, they're either pretty sick (i.e. almost dying) or it's all terribly simple (broken bone, oooh...go get it bandaged, take painkillers and anti-inflammatories, come back in 6 weeks for some axle-grinding and then have a prescription for physio for the next six months).

So, someone thought, let's make it interesting.

Don't get me wrong: I don't condone this method of thinking. Not at all. But I do understand it.

Now if you'll excuse me, I must alight from my soapbox (*phew* that feels goooood) and take this plate of S. dysenteriae to the canteen. I still need to tick my 'has investigated an outbreak' box...



NB: as an addendum, I'd just like to add that, I don't know if anyone is ever safe ANYWHERE, so this shall not dissuade me from continuing to apply for jobs in anyplace. Wartorn-diseaseravaged-terroristharbouring: a job is a job is a job, and while I don't have anyone for whom I am wholly responsible, I shall go where the job takes me, THEN try to be as safe as possible. *raspberry* And to those of you who think, "oooh, maybe I shouldn't go to London on an OE then." FFS!!!!!

Labels:

posted by Nomes @ Tuesday, July 03, 2007  
2 Comments:

  • At 4:33 am, July 04, 2007, Blogger Brewsta said…

    I have some points to make and they are three:

    1. Your transition from terror doctor rant to anti-bacterial soap rant was breathtaking.
    2. I have neither bought nor used anti-bacterial soap.
    3. We shop in the same Tesco.

     

  • At 3:12 am, July 05, 2007, Anonymous Anonymous said…

    See, I knew all that eating dirt was good for you!
    Love, Mamma

     
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