Spring Tide in Cape Town

The supermoon this past weekend brought a majestic spring tide to Blaauwberg, Cape Town. I went snapping away with my tiny camera along the esplanade.

This was taken seconds before I was drenched by the wave. Underestimated it…

If you’ve never been to Blaauwberg: no, the water doesn’t usually reach there…

This one makes me want to wax poetic.

Notice Table Mountain faintly in the back.

Unfortunately my little happy-snap camera couldn’t adequately catch the beautiful moon, but I’m sure pictures will abound of that soon.

 

The Meeting: Ni & Mi

Today (a public holiday) I went to Stellenbosch, in the Winelands District of the Western Cape. The medical campus is far from the main campus, so I don’t get to go to Stellenbosch very often. But today I met Nazirah.

Yes, the tree has to be in there. It's pretty, and I was having a bad hair day

Nazirah and I are both medical students – she in Malaysia and I in Cape Town. She’s doing her elective rotation in Cape Town. We met via our blogs. And no, we’re not the kind of people who readily meet people over the internet.

Because I don’t know Stellenbosch very well myself, one of my friends, Dee, joined us for the day. She gave us the royal tour and it was lovely. And a royal tour must of course start with some lovely tea. We went to The Birdcage, a quaint little coffee shop with the most amazing teas. I had French Vanilla tea, Dee had Raspberry and Blueberry, and Nazirah had Rooibos tea – the endemic and famous “red bush” tea of South Africa. And she liked it!

Dee's tea is pink, Ni's is reddish. How lovely are the tea sets?!

We learned a lot about similarities and differences between our countries in terms of healthcare, politics and infrastructure. It was amazing. It was a chilly – but not cold – Autumn day, and the town was simply beautiful.

And I got to meet an international friend, and that with the aid of WordPress.

Easter Away from Home

My family is big into family-stuff. I can’t say I have always been appreciative of that (I am often a grumpy, anti-establishment child), but I love my family. And there is nothing I love more than spending family-time with my family.

Easter is such a family-holiday. And this year is the first time that I spend Easter away from my family. It’s difficult, and what’s worse is that it’s not even a matter of clinical obligations. It’s just that for the first time, plane tickets were flat-out unaffordable.

I hate petrol prices.

Fortunately, The Boy is making this long-weekend very special.

Yesterday we went to the V&A Waterfront. Neither of us really like the place, because it is teeming with tourists and so everything is super-expensive. But he needed to buy something there. And I suppose it’s kind of pretty.

There’s a Haagen Dazs Ice Cream Parlour there. Their ice cream is really expensive in South Africa, so I’ve never eaten there. But he decided, “Try everything once.”

So we did. This ice cream cost ZAR70! That’s about 7 Euro. Ridiculous. But it was delicious. Not that ANY ice cream should ever cost that much. No matter how wealthy you are. He said, “You should enjoy it, because as long as I’m paying we are never having this again.”

Funnier part: he locked his keys in his car. I climbed in via his sun-roof. I thought it was funny, but I think he was a little embarrassed.

I miss my family. I guess it’s part of growing up. But Easter and Christmas will always be family-time for me.

So today we eat lots of chocolate. As my Friend says,

“I think it’s a law or something.”

There Was This Boy: Your Future Matters

A few times every year I see on Facebook, blogs and Twitter how high school students consider their options for life after school. 

There was this boy I dated in high school. He was not a genius, but he performed as an above-average student. He did well in Maths, Science and Biology. He was good at interpersonal relations.

In short, he was not meant to be a candidate for struggles later in his life.

But he had a family job lined up and decided, despite advice from people who cared for him, not to study after school. After all, he was the heir to the family business.

But the family business has now become insolvent. He, his older brother and his parents have no means of an income. His little sisters are still at school. And he cannot find another job, because he has virtually no experience and no qualifications either.

I am sad. I can’t offer him much help. And I am a little disappointed, because this needn’t have been his situation.

There are many unemployed people the world over who have qualifications and still cannot find a job, I know this; but I think his job-hunt may have been a little easier had he had some form of CV.

My heart breaks for the many people who cannot find jobs despite their best efforts. My biggest wish is that all young people (even the “trust fund babies”) will consider the long run and prepare for tougher times.

When doin’ it wrong is fatal

Radiology was quite cool. It is amazing how many things physicians conveniently forget when sending a patient for a scan. Like not sending a proper history and examination report (erm, I’ve done that) or sending a patient without IV-access, or a hysterical patient without some happy medicine.

Or like people who want to evaluate an injured knee with an X-ray. Or projectile vomiting with an MRI.

Interestingly, did you know that MRIs can be really dangerous? Okay, so you only had to watch House M.D. to have seen the lead-based tattoos being burned out of that convict’s skin, so that’s kind of a no-brainer.

What surprises me is that it happens. Tobias Gilk writes about MRI safety and the damage that it can do if approached irresponsibly. It seems a little ironic: MRI’s use no ionising radiation, which makes it a real blessing of a scan. But come to close to it with metal objects and you are looking for trouble.

I don't know if this is a real image, but according to reports this kind of thing has happened many times before.

Oxygen tanks should not be brought near an MRI-machine. Neither should firearms – they can fire spontaneously. The doctors in the hospital say that they have not had such an incident (touch wood) and I could also not find any details of MRI-related accidents from South Africa. Which is a miracle, since our public hospitals don’t exactly have metal detectors or anything to screen patients prior to MRI.

But, having a look at the numerous pictures and horror stories on the net, it is clear that they happen. I am not a fear monger. I think MRIs are awesome, if indicated. But please people, be safe around those magnets!

My Wish for World TB Day

As posted yesterday, today is World Tuberculosis Day. StopTB has this really cool campaign where you can make your own stopTB poster about your goals for this disease. The theme is “Stop TB in my lifetime”, which I think is an excellent motive.

This is the poster I made:

One is allowed only to click on pre-decided slogans. My real, and most pressing TB issue today, is this:

That health care workers will take greater care of their own lungs. In the Western Cape, where I live, TB is more concentrated than anywhere else in the world. Yet I too often see doctors and nurses walking among TB patients in the wards and examining them without the appropriate masks.

We would not operate without gloves because we are aware of the HIV/AIDS risk. So why do we not protect ourselves as adequately against another chronic disease with severe mortality and morbidity?

To some extent, much is to blame on the government. When I was on family medicine, there were no N95-TB masks available.

So this is my wish: That you will take care of your lungs as you would want your parent or your child to do.

Clever Patients and Patient Education

During my two weeks in the Rural Western Cape, only two of my patients had finished high school. One was an elderly lady from a privileged background.

It was shocking to see how low the literacy rates were in that little place and how that affected patient education. Medicine compliance, smoking cessation, family planning… it’s tough. Especially with the high rates of FAS in the region (lots of vineyards).

But the biggest lesson was not health education to these patients. Rather, I learned not to slack on health promotion of the more “educated” patients. I look at my class, of whom probably 50% smokes regularly. Intelligent people make stupid life decisions.

I almost skimped on speaking to my patient (who had finished high school many years ago) about smoking cessation. Good thing I changed my mind. Turns out he thinks that puffing eliminates the cancer risk. So we had a nice discussion about oral cancer (yum).

You want to save the world? Figure out why health promotion rarely works. And find a way of making it work.

If ever you should visit Africa…

…mind the cattle overhead.

Also, mind the traffic police, who might (or should) give one a fine for driving while operating a cellular phone or a camera.

This made me laugh. I don’t know where in Cape Town this was taken or by whom. But in Bhisho (Eastern Cape, RSA), there are goats grazing outside the huge and very fancy office blocks.

The ABCs of Me

Gerry’s Space has nominated “everyone who enjoys this world of blogs” for the ABC (Awesome Blog) Content Award.

1. Share something about yourself using each letter of the alphabet

2. Pay the award forward to however many

So without further ado:

Afrique du Sud – the country of my heart

Books - my first love

Chocolate - my most guilty pleasure

Disease - the thing that gives me a profession, and the thing I work towards erradicating

Eltroxin - a life-saver

French – one day I will learn to speak it, and visit Paris, and own a quaint little place in the South of France, and it will be positively wonderful.

Growth - I’m not very tall, but I do as much as I can to ensure I keep growing in other aspects of my life

Hungry - I often am. Meh, the life of a student.

India - where I want to go for my elective at the end of this year

Jokes - I am not a funny person and I am embarrassingly bad at making jokes. But I do love lolcats!

Karate - I have a Brown Belt 2nd kyu

Love - I’m not much of a romantic anymore and I muse about what love really means a lot. But there is no doubt that I love my family, my friends, this life, beyond measure.

Montreal - one of my favourite cities

New York – another favourite city

Obstetrics - one of my favourite rotations so far. All I want to do is catch babies…

Paradise - by Coldplay, one of my favourite South African music videos by a non-South African band

Quiet - I can be quite noisy, but I love a quiet spot, to be alone with my thoughts

Raucous - I love being raucous with the friends close to me. It’s a side of me people rarely see.

Semester at Sea – I want to do it. I will find a way.

Ticklish - people should tickle me more. I need to laugh more often.

Untidy - if a cluttered desk if a sign of a cluttered mind, what is an empty desk?

Variety - I get bored SO easily. It’s part of the reason why I hate sitting down to study.

Worldwide - I consider myself a global citizen. One day I will travel the world.

Xhosa - a language I should learn ASAP. It will make my job so much easier.

Yesterdays haunt me. I am learning to let go and to be a more relaxed person.

Zhangjiajie - the most beautiful place I have ever visited, and I never knew it existed.

I am tagging a bunch of medical students with awesome blogs:

The Medical Rose

Action Potential

Dr Sprout

Jenn Duroy

Nazirah

Trisha

 

The Anti-Valentine #2

It’s STI/Condom awareness week in South Africa! I find it mildly amusing that this takes place during Valentine’s Week – whether that was intended as a buzz-kill is debatable. 

STIs and especially HIV is huge in South Africa. If you’re new to this blog, click here for more of my related posts.

A lot has been said and asked about our population’s failure to clamp down on our alarming statistics. The poster below gave me one more answer to that question: our health education sucks! This infographic, in my opinion, is excellent. And it is the only of its kind that I have seen.

Health Education Posters are generally too crowded with information, aesthetically displeasing and carry a punitive or patriarchal tone.

Hence, view the miracle below: