Starship Children's Hospital

Today was my first day at the hospital. The main hospitals in Auckland are a nice 40min walk across the city - fortunately most of the way is covered by shop awnings so I didn't start the day with sunburn! We had our induction, went to get ID badges (was glad to see that admin is always a palaver, even on the other side of the world), and then I went for lunch.

Next to the hospital is a massive park, called Auckland Domain, which has in it the Auckland museum and a Wintergarden with fernery, tropical house and cool house. The park was built around an extinct volcano, so it has an amphitheatre-style look because of the rings of rock produced thousands of years ago when the volcano was active. There are duck ponds which apparently are made by the natural springs in the park. It was here that I ate my lunch, so I got to look at scenes like this:

...and this:

After that I went back to the hospital. Starship Children's Hospital is massive, and is the only tertiary and quaternary paediatric service in the entire country. In the words of one of the other students, it is 'very bling' - indeed, there are botanical gardens and stuff inside. I wanted to take pictures, but obviously that is not the done thing when children are involved, so instead here is one I stole from the internet:

When I went onto the ward I was left with the house officer called DrL, who is from the UK. After graduating from Birmingham medical school she did her foundation training (the first two years of training) then came out to Auckland to work for a year. During this time she applied for specialty training back in the UK, so is going back in a few months to start that. She could not recommend this career break more; better pay, better perks, better weather, better standard of living, and you can wear shorts to work! Apparently there is a big deficit of doctors here, so it is relatively easy to get a job.

The placement I am doing is paediatric neurology, and because it is the only tertiary centre it is full of weird and wonderful conditions - acute disseminated encephalomyelitis, paraneoplastic NMDA receptor encephalitis, all sorts of tumours and complicated AVM's. I then clerked in a couple of patients, including one little guy who told me his name was Tyrannosaurus Rex and kept trying to eat me.

One thing I have noticed about Auckland folk is that they are extremely unobservant: they keep apologising about the 'rubbish' weather, and don't seem to notice that I'm a horrible sweaty mess in shorts and a vest, covered in heat rash and starting to burn! Apparently the 'cold weather' is on its way, but this needs to be taken with a pinch of salt, as winters in Auckland have temperatures of 10-15 degrees, average of about 13 degrees. However will I cope?!