the great overland track

People often ask me why I chose to come to Tasmania. Not least of all, Tasmanians. While the immediate reasons are relatively straight-forward (not sure where I wanted to be; was busy arranging time in Liberia when my Residency classmates were looking for jobs; thought "why not go overseas?" and not all that confident in my Spanish; signed up w/ an agency and was given a few choices), there is more to it than "why not?" In fact, I think that quite a few Tasmanians suffer from the "Statue of Liberty" phenomenon, in that if you are from a place you rarely end up doing the things that tourists do when they come to that place. For Tasmania, the "touristy things" are amazing opportunities for "bushwalking" (camping/hiking) and exploring the wilderness that is relatively untouched.

Much like my home state of West Virginia, the preservation of the wild is the positive that often (though not always and usually not without someone to fight for it!) comes with relative under-development. In fact, I find myself telling people here that I felt comfortable coming to this town in northern Tasmania specifically because it was similar to the town I grew up in back home in West Virginia. Go Big Reds.

With that as an introduction, I have on my refrigerator a list of goals for Tasmania. In addition to "improve posture," "drink two glasses of water a day," "run 9.30 min mile for 1/2 marathon," "normalize TSH level" and "Sort out life direction," on that slip of paper there is also the aspiration-- "Walk the Overland." Well, the TSH may be coming along, but the only one I've been able to cross off so far has been that last. And thank goodness for that.

The Overland Track is one of Australia's and certainly Tasmania's most famous walks. Similar to the Appalachian Trail in the States but perhaps more isolated, the track starts in the Cradle

Mountain National Park and makes its way south through the World Heritage area for 65 kilometers to end at Lake St. Clair. A lot of my pictures from the trip are also up on my Facebook page, but I thought I'd try to put some up here along w/ a little bit of context.

First off, the Players. Myself and my girlfriend YoungJoo started off in the morning, leaving my flat in West Launceston, loaded up and ready for adventure. Naturally she felt the need to bring along a tiny toy stuffed possum...

As with all great adventres, we first made our way to that most exotic of locales, the bus stop:

While game and having been on a few hikes w/ me previously, Youngie hadn't really done any extended camping or bushwalking at all before. This prompted the following photo in which I point out what is on my mind and the lack thereof once we actually get on the trail...

During the popular season in Dec-Jan-Feb-March (aka summer), the trail can only be hiked North to South. So we had to convoy down to the end at Lake St. Claire the night before, leave one of our cars, and carpool back. Because of the length of the drive, we ended up driving back in the evening, leading to the maiming of several species of Australian wildlife and the front end of my 98 Toyota Camry (anyone in Tassie in the market?)

The Track itself was fantastic and we got off to a pretty good start, crossing Cradle Valley and heading up to Marion's lookout, the face track to Cradle Mountain, and getting in to Waterfall Valley Hut on the first day.

This is a view of Crater Lake from the Overland Track on the way to Marion's Lookout, day 1.

Climbing up to Marion's Lookout, and then standing on it w/ Cradle in the background:

The last is Cradle Mountain as seen from the Cradle Plateau, "just" after Marion's Lookout.

To be honest things began to blur together a bit as to which day was when or where. And every time I stopped to use the camera I kept thinking of that line from Desert Solitaire where he exorts the tourists to see what is in front of them as opposed to trying to compose a picture about it. But here are a few shots, regardless. I recall one of the Parks and Wildlife workers mentioning that 60% of the species found in the world heritage area are found nowhere else (which explains the planked boardwalk!). Quite a few of the areas on the Cradle Plateau reminded me of the algific talus slope we saw in West Virginia as part of the Mountain Institute. A giant outcrop collapsed and buried a glacier underneath it, trapping and insulating the ice and leading to tundra-type flora in the middle of the Appalachians! :)

There were fair amounts of myrtle and deciduous forest as well, especially on our day 2 marathon!

Buttongrass alongside the track, day 1 or 2. I'd thought it had gotten it's name from the clumps in which it grows, but apparently the button-like appearance of the flowers is responsible. I didn't see any flowers-- I like my reason.


Here is the trail to Mt. Ossa at Pelion Gap, day 3. We left our large packs at the trailhead and spent aobut 4 hours climbing up to the top of Ossa, which is Tasmania's highest point and often snow covered even in early summer. The climb was a bit challenging in parts but not technical. There were certainly a few traverses where you thought to yourself, "I'm doing this on purpose?" Managed to get sunburned in spite of the sunscreen on this one. This is why bald guys like the big hats! :(

A side trip on day 4 took us to Fergusson Falls, just 2km North of DuCane Gap. A very nice Frenchman took our photo. I was of course envious in that he had two trekking poles and I only the one I'd borrowed from a friend of Youngie's. I am happy to say that one birthday later I now have a set of my own poles.

It was interesting in that at the trailhead to Mt. Ossa, it was this guy's pack that the crows had un-zipped and gotten into. By watching hikers from afar over time, the crows learned that food was in the packs and had worked out how to unzip them with their beaks!

It finally rained on us day 3 and 4. It's only fair-- the area we were hiking through at the time was temperate rainforest-- similar to the Pacific Northwest or cloud producing forests like Monteverde in Costa Rica, perhaps.

Here, in the distance you can just make out Young on the track, surrounded by enormous gum trees. This was day 4 or so.

Day 5 we hit the suspension bridge over the Narcissus River on our way to Lake St. Clair. A fair number of features in the area have names derived from ancient Greece. I think it started with an area termed "the Labyrinth" and people just kept it up from there. I particularly enjoy the warning sign...

We ended up having a spot in each of the huts we came across, so never had to use the tent we brought. But at least one couple in the group we started out with did get caught between huts and ended up using theirs, so it's definitely worth it to have one available. This is Narcissus hut, which is the last one we came across. It's certainly not the nicest, as some of them were amazing, especially considering there's nothing else around.

So this is me scratching my head at Narcissus after summoning the ferry to take us out. You can either walk or catch a ferry for the last bit, but you have to plan ahead for this. Because we didn't, we had to use the radio in the hut to talk to the ferry base. Hysterical, but also eeriely like that one scene in the Xbox game "Left 4 Dead" when you have to radio the boat to pick up your group of survivors from the zombies out in the woods. Yeah, creepy.

The beautiful, and non-zombie infested Lake St. Clair.

It is here I saw my first (and likely only) platypus in the wild! By the time I got my camera out, it looked like a ripple in the water-- sorry!

This is me next to a gum tree, also near Narcissus at Lake St. Clair, waiting for the ferry.

I don't know why gaiters are so popular with bushwalkers here. I myself never wore them when doing hiking in the States. I suppose they do help keeping socks/feet/boot tops dry. But I wonder if they're also more popular here as just another layer of snake protection. In the US, snake bites are unpleasant and will put a damper on your trip, but in Aussie some of the snakes are so poisonous that when you get bitten your pet goldfish dies, too.
And speaking of which, this is the only sign we saw regarding snake activity. It was posted at the visitor center at St. Clair. Yup, at the end of the hike. Thanks for that, fellas.

So, not to sound too much like Uncle Travelling Matt, there you have it, my nephew Gobo. I hope to get to do more of this stuff, and I hope Young enjoyed it as much as she said she did (btw, helpful tip-- winter rated sleeping bags are the way to go, but that's another story...) and would go again. After years in Baltimore and NYC, it was nice to get out of "the Big Smoke" and into the woods, where the wild things are. ;)

May the Road Rise to Meet You / May the Wind Be Always at Your Back /

May the Sun Shine Warm upon Your Face / the Rain Fall Soft upon Your Fields /

And until We Meet Again / May God Hold You in the Hollow of His Hand.

--aws

emergency medicine: kinda like an un-funny version of "Scrubs"

Warning: the following is a complete waste of time!

I've always been interested in the social construction of health and disease, the supplanting of religion by science, the perception of healthcare and medicine by society. So it's interesting to see what people assume about you-- good or bad-- when it is revealed that you are a doctor. Also, some of it stems from the fact that so much of your time/development/personality goes into medicine that you can't help but view even your own life through a medical lens. As when JD in Scrubs looks at all of his friends in terms of what's likely to kill them. So, it's fair to say that at times my life does feel like an un-funny version of "Scrubs." (probably something from season 4-- was that the low point or what?). Anyway, interestingly, a survey of the ACP (Internists' professional association) a few years back asked what the most realistic medicine show on TV was. "ER" won at the time, I think primarily because it was the one most watched and most familiar to people. But "Scrubs," a comedy focusing on the absurdity of medicine and the hospital as work-place, came in a close third-- and this was after only one or two seasons...

Maybe because it's so related w/ questions of our own mortality and what it means about how or when we die, everyone has an opinion about everything medical or health related. Especially as we ?finish/enter a acrimonious "discussion" about how we'll be paying for it all-- or not.

http://www.theamericanscholar.org/to-die-of-having-lived/

To quote Sir Ken Robinson, "It is one of those things that go deep with people, you know, like money and religion, and other things."

http://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity.html


It is a universal preoccupation.

And so it deserves to be mocked.

I think ER in particular lends itself to a certain kind of gallows humor. And also a certain amount of frustration (there are facebook groups "911 is for emergencies" and "being drunk is not an emergency" started by fed-up providers) that is sublimated in this same sense of humor.

So, here are a few of my favorite medically-related comic moments from various internet sources. I'm sure you can think of a few others.


Man Stroke Woman -- hysterical British series starring among others Nick Frost from Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz fame:

ER Gyn exam- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1wAYCgqc2uk

"May I be blunt with you?"- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Eng-pRT9uA

Breaking bad news - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ka0_wc4n8oc

Intimate role-playing, nurse - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rZIb1VPEpEk


This is a good website where apparently you put in a script and they create a cartoon based on it. This ER patient is a composite (probably) but it's not far off! (thanks Dr. Boddie) - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_m64cy1MMPg

At big centers, we often refer to patients sent in from outlying (and often smaller and less-resourced) health institutions as being sent from an "outside hospital." As in, "this is a 45 yo M referred from OSH on 11/3/10 for cough w/ a presumptive dx of..." This is a vid from med students out at University of Pennsylvania detailing a few issues w/ some referrals - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xskFo75Wdhs

n.b. - "cathing" someone is a procedure that interventional cardiologists get paid a bit for in private practice. The other jokes are quasi inside jokes at the expense of the care providers being commented on. A favorite pass-time in medicine...

The outstanding movie Spies Like Us has hundreds of great moments. One great one is the "doctor" bit in which Chevy Chase and Dan Akroyd play spies pretending to be doctors - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AqBPOWpOg0o

Another great moment is when they do a surgery w/o knowing what they're doing, but I couldn't find it apart from in Czech!

The comedian Brian Reagan has a great take on his Emergency Room visit - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-JRQXYy9wk

You can always count on Monty Python for good stuff. This Hospital Sketch from "The Meaning of Life" hits the heroism of the hospital administrator on the head - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lxOu1DyVQV8&feature=related

The Onion is fantastic for some of my favorite bits:

Preparing for a hospital stay - http://www.theonion.com/content/node/38410

kidney donation video - http://www.theonion.com/content/video/anonymous_philanthropist_donates

an excellent example of the need for "further research" in academic medicine in which studies of the overtly obvious or esoterically irrelevant can be the basis of an entire career -
http://www.theonion.com/content/video/study_multiple_stab_wounds_may_be

Organ and tissue donation, anyone? -
http://www.theonion.com/content/video/medical_miracle_man_lives_thanks to stolen heart

"You are only as old as you feel" -
http://www.theonion.com/content/video/worlds_oldest_neurosurgeon_turns

And finally, a few bits from Scrubs, which thru Season 3 was some of the best stuff on TV (I hear Season 5 picked up a bit) - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wLGT24NYguM&feature=related

Dr. Cox, my personal hero - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rRBq-6lVxzU&NR=1

Good luck!

--andrew s.

224 South Exeter is not that into you... and other stories

unfortunate hair --> responsible man

It has been some time since I've been able to update the doctoroffortune blog, so I'd be surprised if it's still being checked. But, that's primarily because I've been having some fun and doing a few thins (hopefully) worth blogging about. Interestingly, I've also been pressured by friends to get my photos up on Facebook where they're more easily accessible, so it's kind of interesting to think of how the medium changes the message. Blogspot is a little slower in uploading photos, but obviously there's a larger space for narrative. How would this change how you tell a story, or which story you would choose to tell? Looking at what I've chosen to write about, and what pictures I've chosen to upload on Facebook, I think that the blog is more about my experience of the situations, or at least my observations of them, than the situations themselves, which make for better snapshots.

Ants at "Jonestown" They of course have developed some kind of immunity and are now again overrunning my apartment....

In any event, time has flown here. It's hard to believe that I'm having to start thinking about cancelling my salary packaging and so on-- I've not even gotten all the Christmas gifts out! But it has been fun. Below are a few pictures from the Launceston City Park event "Carols by Candlelight." Given the late sunset, it was still pretty sunny out for most of it. Also below are the lyrics of "Six White Boomers," which is about Santa using kangaroos to pull his sleigh. Yeah, no one here knew the words either...

www.tasgreetings.com/boomers.html

There've been a few concerts and so on in Central Park, including Symphony under the Stars, when the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra would play. There was also the Festivale, which was a food/wine tasting shin-dig, at which I saw "Mariachi Australia." Kind of awesome & hysterical. I have Snr. & Snra Marlow to thank that I knew the words to "cellito lindo" and sang along in Tasmania. Life takes you weird places, anyway.

Of course, there are still the things that make me giggle inside. Like, for example, this ad for "homely" accomodation...

As far as the title goes, I'm not a huge fan of romantic comedies in general, but my old roommate Brian let me know about this scene in "He's Just Not That Into You" a few months before it came out. That's right, _before_ it came out. I'd moved up to the Bronx from 224 S. Exeter (or "sex-eter," as I pronounced it) and got the call from him that they were filming a movie and using our house as a location. So I finally got around to checking it out:

It's in this scene, and Jennifer Connelly pulls up outside her (our!) unit in a Baltimore townhouse block, walks up to the door, and -cut!- That's about it. The rest of the interior shots were done elsewhere. But first, a shout out to Little Italy and Vaccaro's cannoli and the bocce courts around the corner. So, apparently what happened was an Assistant Director got Brian's permission to film the facade. Then they came and replaced our rusty mailbox, improved the shaky fence, and put in a new screen door. They filmed the 3 seconds or so of screen time-- then took everything down and put back what was there before. I later learned that the place was supposed to be undergoing renovations in the movie. Ok-- three things. One, if you have to do that much work, why not just pick a door you liked better to begin with. Two, thanks for the comment on my place-- that you had to spruce it up to make it look like it was in need of renovation. And three, can we have some of that stuff back?

More soon....

--andrew s.