40 deg heat

Omigosh I can't believe how hot it is here lately. It's been hovering around 40 degrees the past two weeks. I'm sitting here in a house that feels like a permanent sauna. You turn on the cold water tap and it takes a few minutes before it feels somewhat cool. It's so hot that we're all having trouble even sleeping. It's incredible how in Canada everone has invested in a little piece of miracle called air con, but many people here in Australia don't have it and suffer through the hot summer days like we are experiencing now.

I know I should be happy about the great weather that we are getting but this is the sunniest city in the world so you pretty much get up every day of the year expecting it to be sunny. So too bad, I'm going to complain about the heat while most of you complain about the -40 deg weather. I have to play baseball in this heat on most weekends with no shade. That's just a healt risk if you ask me.

However there is one good thing about this, it heats up literally everything. So after you take a nice cold shower, I wrap my towel around myself and it feels like someone has warmed up my towel. It surprises every time because the towel doesn't feel warm until you wrap it around yourself. It's a great feeling, almost like getting pampered and getting first class treatment...until you realise it's because of the 40 deg heat...Oh well...Gotta treasure little moments like those.

What's next???....Bring it on!!!!

Another four weeks have past and another placement successfully completed. I've just completed my musculo placement and it was definitely the most challenging one yet. It was also the one I have been waiting with great anticipation. Musculo is something I have always loved and thought I will be doing once I'm done here. It lived up to the hype. It was great, mostly because I had a great supervisor who made it alright to make mistakes and learn from it. I wasn't worried about possibily failing because of little mistakes and was able to learn a lot from it. I had a lot of new patients during my placement and am very grateful for it because you get very little, if any, information about the patient beforehand. You have to go in there, ask the right questions and figure out what is wrong with them. It's great. This placement made me feel like a real physio but the more I saw, the more I realised how little I knew. My biggest fear now is losing everything that I have gained when I go on my next placement.

It's amazint, there's only two more placements to go but I'll feel as though the journey is basically over once I get through the next placement and the final exam immediately following the placement.

Next stop, neuro placement at the guru hospital of neuro. I get a little worried before every placement now, at the possibility of failing when I'm so close to the finish line. Not because of my incompetence but because of the stories you hear of people failing and how subjective the whole evaluationg thing really is. My housemate KP is just finishing there today and reckons it has been her best placement thus far. However I also have another friend there doing the exact same placement and is struggling to stay afloat. I know the two of them quite well and one of them to be stuggling this much is shocking, it's his best subject academically. No use worrying about it before I even start.

I'll be on the wards somewhere, which means working mostly with patients who have just suffered a stroke. We've learnt in class how important that period is for stroke patients because they can't move their limbs and some will be medically unstable. Our role is to go in there every day, twice a day and ensure every single joint is moved to prevent any stiffness. We're like the life line of joints. We keep them loose and ready until the master is ready to take over once again. If we don't do it properly, they may lose their range and not be able to move it properly. Scary stuff when you think about how critical our role is and really, how crucial the whole medical staff is to another person's life. I've never thought of physios ever being that important in someone's survival until this course.

Here's wishing the next 5 weeks goes as well as the past few placements and exams. Bring It!!! Step up to the plate or step aside...