Sunday, July 04, 2004
A Rainy Night in Calgary (Brave New World)
Just a short post tonight, as I have to be up early in the morning for my first day of practising medicine on a new continent...
Our first fortnight in Canada has flown past and is now behind us... we arrived two weeks ago today and we seem to have packed a lot of work into a short time. The first week was largely spent kitting out the house with Ikea furniture and kitchen stuff (and assembling it), while the second was centred around choosing, buying, registering, insuring and (finally) driving our new car. I also spent Wednesday afternoon at the hospital getting my ID and parking passes sorted out and getting some training on the 'online orders' system. You don't write down what you want for each patient, you just enter 'orders' at a terminal - it's gonna take some getting used to...
At least we got to spend a bit of free time over the 4-day holiday weekend doing a few fun things like visiting Canada Olympic Park, watching the fireworks, getting lost on country roads, seeing a dinosaur museum (very impressive presentation on the strange fossils found in the Burgess Shale, btw) and going to a heritage park.
As the weather has been bad today, we spent most of the afternoon and evening at home and the house is finally starting to feel like home, with TV, music, computers, books, pictures, plants and Playstation now all in place. Our mini-stereo system from home works OK with a voltage transformer, but our Region 2 DVDs and our multi-region DVD player won't work with our Canadian NTSC TV, so we'll have to upgrade to a dual-format PAL/NTSC telly at some stage or else just watch them on the eMac. Once the sofas come (hurry up, IKEA!) the house will be more or less complete.
The webcam has turned out to be the big hit of the moment, and seems to be taking the edge off the feeling of separation from home for everyone, although I suppose we've been dancing too fast so far to dwell on homesickness too much.
Tomorrow is going to be a big day, the first one of getting up early, driving to work, getting into routine again and doing what I came here to do - (I did start this "let's-go-to-Canada" ball rolling, after all, so I suppose it's time to put my money where my mouth is...). I've got a training session at 0800 for the hospital's online dictation system, then an interview with the boss at 0900, followed by the start of my one-month rotation in Radiation Oncology. No surgery, no operating, just radiotherapy. I'm a bit nervous about it, being a surgeon and all (not an oncologist) but I'm here to learn and it's all part of the program...
I've also found out that I'm filling in on the on-call resident rota for 2 nights a month, starting in 2 weeks (yikes!) I had hoped for a bit longer than this to get used to the system, but it looks like I'll have to jump into the deep end and hope that I float. I'll be living in the hospital while I'm on-call (yuk), and I'm told it's pretty busy being a resident (think Peter Benton on ER) but it's an experience not many Northern Ireland surgeons get to go through, and whatever doesn't kill me makes me stronger, right? (fingers firmly crossed) My main worry is getting the simple things right, like learning new names and doses for drugs, ordering the right tests etc. I'd be much happier operating all night, but I've got to learn the ropes first.
The upside of being on call (apart from the experience) is that I'll be paid at 80 dollars an hour, so 2 days a month (48 hours) will work out at about 4000 dollars a month, which will just about double my salary. This rate is much more than at home (you get about 9 quid an hour on the NHS, maybe 20 dollars), but then doctors are paid a lot more over here later on too (I'm told you can expect up to 450,000 dollars as a member of staff, which is about 200K quid, almost 4 times the starting salary of an new NHS consultant)
Oh, and hopefully by the time our alarm goes off at 0615, we'll have a nice fax from the Canadian High Commission in London with P's work permit authorisation and instructions on how to get the actual piece of paper she needs. We might need to leave the country briefly so that she can re-enter in her own right - what a palaver! Although if we get in the car and head south, we can be in Montana in 5 hours, apparently...
Anyway, off to bed and more details on my 'first day at the new school' tomorrow (wish me luck!)
J
Our first fortnight in Canada has flown past and is now behind us... we arrived two weeks ago today and we seem to have packed a lot of work into a short time. The first week was largely spent kitting out the house with Ikea furniture and kitchen stuff (and assembling it), while the second was centred around choosing, buying, registering, insuring and (finally) driving our new car. I also spent Wednesday afternoon at the hospital getting my ID and parking passes sorted out and getting some training on the 'online orders' system. You don't write down what you want for each patient, you just enter 'orders' at a terminal - it's gonna take some getting used to...
At least we got to spend a bit of free time over the 4-day holiday weekend doing a few fun things like visiting Canada Olympic Park, watching the fireworks, getting lost on country roads, seeing a dinosaur museum (very impressive presentation on the strange fossils found in the Burgess Shale, btw) and going to a heritage park.
As the weather has been bad today, we spent most of the afternoon and evening at home and the house is finally starting to feel like home, with TV, music, computers, books, pictures, plants and Playstation now all in place. Our mini-stereo system from home works OK with a voltage transformer, but our Region 2 DVDs and our multi-region DVD player won't work with our Canadian NTSC TV, so we'll have to upgrade to a dual-format PAL/NTSC telly at some stage or else just watch them on the eMac. Once the sofas come (hurry up, IKEA!) the house will be more or less complete.
The webcam has turned out to be the big hit of the moment, and seems to be taking the edge off the feeling of separation from home for everyone, although I suppose we've been dancing too fast so far to dwell on homesickness too much.
Tomorrow is going to be a big day, the first one of getting up early, driving to work, getting into routine again and doing what I came here to do - (I did start this "let's-go-to-Canada" ball rolling, after all, so I suppose it's time to put my money where my mouth is...). I've got a training session at 0800 for the hospital's online dictation system, then an interview with the boss at 0900, followed by the start of my one-month rotation in Radiation Oncology. No surgery, no operating, just radiotherapy. I'm a bit nervous about it, being a surgeon and all (not an oncologist) but I'm here to learn and it's all part of the program...
I've also found out that I'm filling in on the on-call resident rota for 2 nights a month, starting in 2 weeks (yikes!) I had hoped for a bit longer than this to get used to the system, but it looks like I'll have to jump into the deep end and hope that I float. I'll be living in the hospital while I'm on-call (yuk), and I'm told it's pretty busy being a resident (think Peter Benton on ER) but it's an experience not many Northern Ireland surgeons get to go through, and whatever doesn't kill me makes me stronger, right? (fingers firmly crossed) My main worry is getting the simple things right, like learning new names and doses for drugs, ordering the right tests etc. I'd be much happier operating all night, but I've got to learn the ropes first.
The upside of being on call (apart from the experience) is that I'll be paid at 80 dollars an hour, so 2 days a month (48 hours) will work out at about 4000 dollars a month, which will just about double my salary. This rate is much more than at home (you get about 9 quid an hour on the NHS, maybe 20 dollars), but then doctors are paid a lot more over here later on too (I'm told you can expect up to 450,000 dollars as a member of staff, which is about 200K quid, almost 4 times the starting salary of an new NHS consultant)
Oh, and hopefully by the time our alarm goes off at 0615, we'll have a nice fax from the Canadian High Commission in London with P's work permit authorisation and instructions on how to get the actual piece of paper she needs. We might need to leave the country briefly so that she can re-enter in her own right - what a palaver! Although if we get in the car and head south, we can be in Montana in 5 hours, apparently...
Anyway, off to bed and more details on my 'first day at the new school' tomorrow (wish me luck!)
J
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