i'm not a fan of anime particularly. however last week monday night 2100 i had a glance at some sbs one called stripperella.

pamela anderson plays the voice of the protagonist. how much better can this get?

the story is a very attractive anime blonde with *perfect* body who is a stripper by day, and superhero by night.

last week's episode had stripperella investigating a huge dilemma with supermodels suddenly becoming fat. the underlying reason happened to point to a dodgy plastic surgeon who tweaked with someone sinister while giving them perfect breast implants.

if i was an anime, this is the show i'd want to be on. yeah baby.

Emergency Medicine

last year when picking rotations for this year, i'd strongly considered my future career to be in emergency medicine. working in bendigo ED for the past 4 weeks, i think i've consolidated that view.

i'm a logical person - i like reductionist flowcharts to follow a certain course. all makes sense to me like that. emergency department is perfect in that sense. you don't always get solutions, but everything has a certain type of ending, which perfectly ends the minute your shift ends. there's no lingering on-going patient care (ie compared with gp), and even though some people get satisfaction out of that, i'm quite happily the opposite.

there are only two questions required in emergency:

1) is this patient going to die over the next 10 hours (or whenever my shift ends)?

- yes - fix the problem such that they won't die. this doesn't mean curing as such, but just stabilising them so they don't die while i'm looking after them. then either the next emergency doctor will do the same algorithm, or move onto question 2.

- no - it's not an emergency problem. fix whatever symptom they have and then move on to question 2.

2) does this patient need to be admitted into hospital?

- yes - call medicine or surgery or specialist unit to bring them in. no more work required.

- no - discharge them home or to the care of the gp. no more work required.

it's beautiful. it's poetry.

Bendigo

living out the first 10 weeks of the new doctor life in bendigo emergency department. i live literally 3min walk away, work 4 x 10hr shifts per week (ie. 3 days off a week generally), and earn $21.93 per hour (hopefully with minimal tax).

so far i've had 2 x 10 hour shifts, on monday and tuesday from 2pm-12am. monday was hectic as hell, tuesday was much much quieter. didn't prepare me for tonight (10pm-8am shift). as soon as i walked in, here's the conversation from an emergency consultant:

"...2 residents from icu (intensive care unit) have resigned this week. ed have been told to cover med and surg overnight. so... looks like yun, you're on tonight (covering the entire hospital if anything goes wrong) as the emergency registrar can't leave the department for any reason. it's not fair on you i know. (goodbye, and walks out the door.)"

in short terms, there's two doctors in bendigo hospital tonight. me and an emergency registrar. she overlooks the whole emergency department. meaning if anything else in the hospital goes wrong, yours truly is the special favourite man of the hour.

life is grand. tonight in emergency i've had 4 psych patients screeching including me participating in a team of 6 to hold one down to take blood, a boy with a dislocated elbow bellowing murder as we try to put his arm back into place without success, a middle-aged woman waiting for someone (i deferred myself away) for a vaginal examination, and a multi-vehicle trauma of what appears now to be malaysian illegal immigrants. luckily the med and surg wards have been quiet.

other than that i've had 2 sausages with bread and onions, 4 peanut butter oreos and several pieces of turkish bread with some funky purple tangy dip. now i'm having a quality can of diet coke. resting finally for a brief few moments. things are meant to get busy again at 6am. woooonderful...

to all the aspiring austin students, i have two suggestions for your upcoming final year of medicine: 1) put all expenses on credit card; 2) put all sit-down meal payments in cash. you'll thank me next year.

Japan

after a mere 6 nights in japan, i think i've found the place on earth (melbourne doesn't count since i live here) that i'd otherwise rather be. it is nowhere near as expensive as people make out to be, with good preparations, a small ability to read japanese (katakana especially) and open eyes.

tokyo is a fantastic city full of everything you could ever imagine. whatever you're looking for, there's a district in tokyo dedicated solely to it - electronics, fish, love hotels, views, romance, clothes, freaks... they have it all.

my one regret is that there was so much to see, and so many places to go, that we tended to rush it rather than savouring it. i think i'm definitely going back on my next holidays, starting january 15, 2007... here comes the wait.

returned home to sweet melbourne yesterday morning. been unpacking clothes and loads of shoes since then. also catching up on music again - hasn't been too much i've missed i don't think. how have the past two weeks been:

Hong Kong

djed the 2nd envy event on 27/12 at a club edge. wasn't as packed as sugar, but andy & i once again did a magnificent job to keep them all happy and hippy. once again the venue thought we were the greatest djs of all time. who are we to tell them otherwise??? after all, it's true isn't it...

went to hong kong disneyland on 28/12. ok, disneyland isn't all that it's hyped up to be. if you go to hk disneyland, make sure its with a decent group of friends because you'll be going there to be young and immature, rather than to see a magical world you've never dreamed of. there's only one ride worth going on (two if you include the merry-go-round), so other than that you're only there to look around, buy disney memorabilia and enjoy the prettiness.

if anyone tells you that it takes a whole day to explore there, it's true - you need a whole day to wait in line for things; there isn't a whole days worth of things to do though. neverless, its fun and if you have a whole spare day, you may as well try it.

spent nye at isobar (or isolar) - a delicate bar located on the 4th floor of a rich international conference building. although it wasn't a particularly packed night, we made the party atmosphere there between the 10 of us: yun, leanne, ben, van, paul, mei, may, andy, phil, winston.

for our rewards, we were given practically open bar. we had at least 60 free drinks between us (of which about 6 were drinking much). if a basic spirit is $13 aussie, and we were being shotted (illegal) hallucinogenic absinth, wasabi vodka and other odd myriads, i think the grand total of AUD$40 spent between us was a bargain well worth it.