After a relaxing four days in Cape Town we thought it best to continue the trend with another holiday to the opposite side of South Africa: a safari at the Pilanesberg National Park! This was an epic weekend trip organised and led by our lovely accommodation host Alan, joined by 5 others also in Joburg on elective.
Anyone who hasn’t been on safari before, you gotta try to go some time in your life, it’s awesome. There are key developmental milestones that you’ll find yourself progressing through:
Alex the explorer searching for wildlife
Me attempting to master the “photo-through-binoculars” technique – a game-changer for increasing the zoom on your phone camera!... Okay yeah, I went full Asian I’m sorry.
Alex and Elizabeth hit the 8-hour developmental milestone
This trip was also exciting because at the ripe old age of 23 it was the first time I was going camping!! We arrived at the camp site and unpacked Alan’s 2x3x3m trailer that folded out into 3 tents, a mini kitchen, and a dining table with 8 fold-out chairs… it was Harry Potter madness I tell you. We roasted burgers on the braai, set up a fire and completely burnt our marshmallows, gazed at stars while telling life stories, the whole shebang. It was perfect. (Well, other than getting my feet a bit too close to the fire and burning the soles off my trainers… oh and that night being stupidly cold – Alex wouldn’t even snuggle up in the tent to make it all better, guess we haven’t reached that level of bromance yet :( )
This 1.5l bottle was 100% ice when we got out from our tents in the morning… anyone who says Africa doesn’t get cold is evil and trying to trick you.
Our last week at Bara was relatively uneventful: we were feeling a bit war-weary after a month there so decided to stick to day shifts, and having built up a fair bit of experience it was pretty smooth sailing. Patient comes in having been stabbed in the chest, we now get the idea: obtain a quick history from the paramedics with baseline sats and GCS, check airway and breathing, wheel the patient into resus while trying to get a registrar’s attention, hook them up to the various monitoring leads, pop a cannula in for fluids, collect a blood gas, and arrange a chest X-ray. Us 5 weeks ago: “Help. Someone. Anyone! …Please?”
In fact we had a new elective student from Germany arrive that week so it was our turn to show someone else the ropes! It was weird to think that we were just as lost as her when we started out, what experiences lay ahead of her, and how different she would be in a month’s time. Being made to think and work independently here has been invaluable, giving us a taste of what life will be like as junior doctors – Bara has provided us with reassurance that yes, although at the start we'll be totally lost (and probably pretty terrified), with time on the job around supportive colleagues we should be able to make ourselves useful members of the team before we know it. Fingers crossed!
Having said that, apparently there were still rules we hadn’t yet learnt. Alex begrudgingly wheeled a resus patient to CT for the umpteenth time and upon bringing him back was confronted by the registrar, “Wait, did you take that patient to CT on your own?” “Err yes, I did?” “Why didn’t you take an intern??” “Eerrr because no one told me to?” “Well you should have taken an intern!!” “Err, well I’ve been asked to go alone many times before and it’s never been an issue… in fact, you’re one of the registrars who asked me to do that in the past…” The rule we learnt: seniors can make up new rules whenever they feel like having a power trip.
On the last couple of mornings in Johannesburg we had some final sessions with Nick, who runs Emet Gyms just down the road from Swanage. He’s an absolute legend with the most non-PC repertoire of humour you could ever imagine. Over the last 6 weeks he’s helped us to get in much better shape when we would otherwise have spent our free time lazing around watching TV (we weren’t really feeling the appeal of casual jogs through the streets of Joburg after all we’d seen at Bara…) I’ve never been one for gyms but he provided the perfect mix of fun and hard work – if you’re ever in Joburg and looking to stay fit consider dropping by, you won’t regret it!
Nick in his element. Ooosss.
On our last day we said our thank yous and farewells (and a few good riddances) to the various colleagues we had worked with at the Chris Hani Baragwanath Academic Hospital, and with them the joys and frustrations of the insane cases that come through the doors each day. We drove away from Soweto and its murderous taxi buses for the last time, and so it was that our elective placement came to an end.
Alex found this to be a surreal experience, the moment he realised it was our last day in Johannesburg I could see by the look on his face that his brain had kinda exploded. He gave an emotional monologue of how the elective was something he was aware he’d get to do over 5 years ago, so since then periodically thought about where he could go, what he could do, what he might see, and had been looking forward to coming here all the way through clinical school. Now, it was all over and done and would never happen again... I nodded along empathically to his speech, but really I was just thinking about what I still had left to pack. CCS “active listening” for the win.
Off to Sri Lanka we go!
Anyone who hasn’t been on safari before, you gotta try to go some time in your life, it’s awesome. There are key developmental milestones that you’ll find yourself progressing through:
- 30 minutes – sheer excitement as you see your first animal
- 1 hour – even more excitement as you see the first of your Big Five (buffalo, rhino, elephant, lion, leopard)
- 2 hours – grappling with the dilemma of safari: do I take loads of photos (I mean I want to have pictures to look back on right?) or just watch the animals (I want to take the magic in, I don’t want to waste a safari spending all my time trying to get the perfect shot!)
- 6 hours – fourth of the Big Five spotted, proceed to spend the next few hours trying (and failing) to find the fifth… in our case a leopard
- 8 hours – falling asleep for the first time as you get bored of seeing the same animals, still trying to find a leopard
- 10 hours – hallucinations begin. Branches appear like antlers, every splash of yellow a sleeping lion, every grey rock a rhino – oh no wait, that thing Alex was staring at for 5 minutes and dismissed as a rock was indeed a rhino
- 12 hours – acceptance that we may not see all of the Big Five and instead learning to enjoy and appreciate watching animals we've already seen. It’s properly surreal watching zebras and giraffes and hippos and countless other animals walking or eating or playing all around the same watering hole – Lion King feels.
Alex the explorer searching for wildlife
Me attempting to master the “photo-through-binoculars” technique – a game-changer for increasing the zoom on your phone camera!... Okay yeah, I went full Asian I’m sorry.
Alex and Elizabeth hit the 8-hour developmental milestone
This trip was also exciting because at the ripe old age of 23 it was the first time I was going camping!! We arrived at the camp site and unpacked Alan’s 2x3x3m trailer that folded out into 3 tents, a mini kitchen, and a dining table with 8 fold-out chairs… it was Harry Potter madness I tell you. We roasted burgers on the braai, set up a fire and completely burnt our marshmallows, gazed at stars while telling life stories, the whole shebang. It was perfect. (Well, other than getting my feet a bit too close to the fire and burning the soles off my trainers… oh and that night being stupidly cold – Alex wouldn’t even snuggle up in the tent to make it all better, guess we haven’t reached that level of bromance yet :( )
This 1.5l bottle was 100% ice when we got out from our tents in the morning… anyone who says Africa doesn’t get cold is evil and trying to trick you.
Our last week at Bara was relatively uneventful: we were feeling a bit war-weary after a month there so decided to stick to day shifts, and having built up a fair bit of experience it was pretty smooth sailing. Patient comes in having been stabbed in the chest, we now get the idea: obtain a quick history from the paramedics with baseline sats and GCS, check airway and breathing, wheel the patient into resus while trying to get a registrar’s attention, hook them up to the various monitoring leads, pop a cannula in for fluids, collect a blood gas, and arrange a chest X-ray. Us 5 weeks ago: “Help. Someone. Anyone! …Please?”
In fact we had a new elective student from Germany arrive that week so it was our turn to show someone else the ropes! It was weird to think that we were just as lost as her when we started out, what experiences lay ahead of her, and how different she would be in a month’s time. Being made to think and work independently here has been invaluable, giving us a taste of what life will be like as junior doctors – Bara has provided us with reassurance that yes, although at the start we'll be totally lost (and probably pretty terrified), with time on the job around supportive colleagues we should be able to make ourselves useful members of the team before we know it. Fingers crossed!
Having said that, apparently there were still rules we hadn’t yet learnt. Alex begrudgingly wheeled a resus patient to CT for the umpteenth time and upon bringing him back was confronted by the registrar, “Wait, did you take that patient to CT on your own?” “Err yes, I did?” “Why didn’t you take an intern??” “Eerrr because no one told me to?” “Well you should have taken an intern!!” “Err, well I’ve been asked to go alone many times before and it’s never been an issue… in fact, you’re one of the registrars who asked me to do that in the past…” The rule we learnt: seniors can make up new rules whenever they feel like having a power trip.
On the last couple of mornings in Johannesburg we had some final sessions with Nick, who runs Emet Gyms just down the road from Swanage. He’s an absolute legend with the most non-PC repertoire of humour you could ever imagine. Over the last 6 weeks he’s helped us to get in much better shape when we would otherwise have spent our free time lazing around watching TV (we weren’t really feeling the appeal of casual jogs through the streets of Joburg after all we’d seen at Bara…) I’ve never been one for gyms but he provided the perfect mix of fun and hard work – if you’re ever in Joburg and looking to stay fit consider dropping by, you won’t regret it!
Nick in his element. Ooosss.
On our last day we said our thank yous and farewells (and a few good riddances) to the various colleagues we had worked with at the Chris Hani Baragwanath Academic Hospital, and with them the joys and frustrations of the insane cases that come through the doors each day. We drove away from Soweto and its murderous taxi buses for the last time, and so it was that our elective placement came to an end.
Alex found this to be a surreal experience, the moment he realised it was our last day in Johannesburg I could see by the look on his face that his brain had kinda exploded. He gave an emotional monologue of how the elective was something he was aware he’d get to do over 5 years ago, so since then periodically thought about where he could go, what he could do, what he might see, and had been looking forward to coming here all the way through clinical school. Now, it was all over and done and would never happen again... I nodded along empathically to his speech, but really I was just thinking about what I still had left to pack. CCS “active listening” for the win.
Off to Sri Lanka we go!
Alex catching some beauty sleep (again) as we said goodbye to South Africa.
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