It’s been a busy week at work. I’ve changed offices again. I started my clinical attachment at The Canberra Hospital and I’ve eaten out a bit.

After the last post when I revealed I’d reached 80.2 kg I thought I should revisit the single fillet of salmon again as an evening staple

I did the salmon the way I normally do with a fry pan and lid and a 5 minute timer. I cooked the vegetables with a little soy and honey.

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and again the next night…

Another small piece of salmon

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I’ve been walking every day too

Mr Owl looks good at 0445 AEST with a black background of the night sky

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In preparation for my clinical day a week I started reading some relevant documents.

Tea rather than coffee too

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For reasons I won’t go in to, I was able to return to my old office area. The first thing I did was put up my flags. I felt immediately at home.

My two favourite places in the world. Queensland and the Northern Territory of Australia

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On Friday I started my first day at The Canberra Hospital as an Honorary Visiting Medical Officer in Pathology. I decided I could walk to work from my DoHA car spot

My walk http://runkeeper.com/user/garydlum/activity/178410745

So this is where I’ll be. Building 10.

There is a lot of construction underway so it’s not possible to see the building from outside

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It was a pretty good day. I really enjoyed getting oriented back into a clinical pathology set up. It was nice to speak with clinicians about patients and visit the mortuary and see the museum named after my friend and colleague, viz., Professor Peter Herdson. It was fantastic to get back into the lingo and to start thinking about the wonderful interface being a clinical microbiologist is between the patient in the ward and the vast technological brain power that rests in medical laboratory scientists and other practitioners. I love the technology of pathology. As I grew up in medicine, Professor John Kerr’s most profound comment was that pathology is medicine. If you understand pathology you will understand medicine. Truer words there are not. He also held a firm view that rigorous examination was the best way to produce a well rounded undifferentiated medical graduate who would be ready to learn more about how to heal the sick and teach others to become good practitioners of the art and science of medicine. I love that in pathology we extend our practice into the tactile of holding plates and loops, we can sense the aroma of our friends on the plates, we can see the bright colours of the wonderful chemical reactions in solid and liquid phases. We can stand before instruments worth hundreds of thousands of dollars that reduce the time from specimen reception to result delivery to hours instead of days. But best of all I love that we can take the complex and abstract and share a story with a referring and treating practitioner and help him or her heal their patient. Working in government bureaucracy for the last five years has taught me so many things, but I cannot love it like I love being in a laboratory surrounded by wonderful people and patient specimens, machines and most of all microscopes. Four days a week at DoHA and one day at TCH is a good balance.

As I walked back to my car I was reminded that The Canberra Hospital and the Royal Darwin Hospital were designed in Canada and it was Prime Minister Gough Whitlam who sought to build hospitals in the two territories. The design may well have been good for Canberra but it was a disaster for Darwin. This is a multi-storey, air conditioned building with a furnace up the middle. Indigenous Australians in the Top End communities do not like heights, they don’t like the cold and why require a furnace in a building in subequatorial Australia. What the hell was Prime Minister Whitlam thinking? The best hospital design in the Northern Territory of Australia is the Katherine Hospital. One level, multiple wings with open flow through ventilation and lots of courtyards for patients to gather in along with their intravenous infusion stand and drugs. In Darwin, as much as I love the RDH (not the building itself, I love the people, I love the community, I love the family that is a hospital), it is unseemly to have all the Indigenous Australian patients feel like they have to mill outside on hot concrete with their intravenous infusion stands all because of a mistake from the 1970s.

The walk back had a little detour to capture that image
My walk back http://runkeeper.com/user/garydlum/activity/178532953

On the walk back I passed by an excellent venue for a steak

If you visit Canberra and want a nice bistro steak, the Hellenic Club is a good place for a meal.

This is the building I spend most of my week in

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On Friday night I visited Bron’s place and we enjoyed another great meal and an episode of Game of Thrones.

Wagyu steak and salad

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Fruit covered in white chocolate served with lemon curd ice cream

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