O2 are going to kill me...

Ok, so the thing is- I'm not actually having an amazing time here. Yes, the sun is shining, the skies are a glorious cloudless blue and looking out the window it's hard to see anything that isn't a palm tree. Yet I want to get away.
I suspect it is a combination of tiredness, being somewhere completely different where I don't know anyone, feeling like I'm in everyone's way and not knowing how to work the washing machine. So I am leaving.

A friend of mine from my first uni who now lives in Australia is coming over for a week, so I changed my flight with the intention of touring the North Island with her for a week, then returning home, cutting the trip short by several weeks, and finishing my elective in a hospital back in the UK.
However...
A new option has presented itself: it may very well be possible to finish my elective in one of the bigger cities in New Zealand. I've been put in touch with a couple of guys who seem very keen to have me there and are happy to set something up for the remainder of my time, which is pretty damn decent of them.

So, the plan: I'm meeting these chaps on Wednesday to discuss the options and if it sounds workable, I shall be switching hospitals, putting a whole new swathe of patients in danger!
The upside being if I do take them up on it, I will have first spent a week doing touristy stuff round the North Island with a friend, so it can't be too bad.

The bigger issue is I've been using my phone so much to try and arrange things that O2 felt the need to send me a text this morning to the following effect:
"We thought you'd like to know you've spent £39.59 over your line rental so far this month"
It seems kinda like their way of saying:
"WTF are you doing?! Stop calling people in other hemispheres you moron!!"

As an aside, did you know that Kiwi keyboards do not have a pound sign?? I had to Google pound sign just to find one. £. Just to make a point.

Other than trying to sort things out and coming to terms with my general idiocy, things have been pretty average. I attended a clinic yesterday afternoon (my first since getting here) and spent most of it tapping people's wrists in order to cause them pain (there was a medical reason so it's ok). What I've learned from it is that a lot of people in New Zealand seem to have carpal tunnel syndrome. Also had a chat with an ex-pat Liverpudlian, really nice bloke, who'd been living out here since about 20 years before I was even born. Still hasn't shaken that accent though.

Today I went to a fracture clinic and tried desperately to remember all the different ways of classifying all the different fractures that I once knew and have since forgotten. There's Salter-Harris, Weber, Lisfranc, Jones, Mason, Monteggia, Galeazzi, Hume, Holstein-Lewis, Smith, Colles, Bennet, La Fort, Greenstick, Hangman's, Boxer's; Fractures can be transverse, linear, oblique, spiral, closed or open, complete or incomplete, comminuted, impacted, they may be displaced or undisplaced, angulated, shortened etc etc....

Basically, the bottom line is- it's broken.

This afternoon I got to assist with a hip replacement- ACTUALLY assist, rather than just holding the odd instrument or adjusting the light, or trying not to trip over the portable X-ray machine (Possibly the most embarassing way to de-sterilise yourself AND ensure you aren't invited back to that theatre). Well, I say assist, I mostly just held the patient's leg, but dammit it's a step up from a retractor!

And thus concludes my time at this hospital, tomorrow I shall be boarding a bus for Auckland to meet my friend and see what happens from there I guess.

On the upside, if I do have to return to the UK to finish I've already got a snappy new name for the blog- "Clouds, concrete and casts" Whaddaya think??

Doesn't have quite the same ring, does it?