The end of the dry

A lot has happened in the last few months.

The weather has been just beautiful. Dry crisp nights, not too hot during the day, clear blue skies everyday (bar the occasional burning). Often I went to work thinking that no matter how awful things get, it's impossible to be in a bad mood in this sort of weather. It's just anti- seasonal affective disorder, and makes me wonder how I'll cope with the Sydney winter when I go home. When I was in Sydney in August it was almost unbearably cold, and I wondered how I'd lived there for so long.

Now the dry has sort of ended, and the days are starting to get muggy. The mango season has started though, so it's somewhat compensating for the lack of good weather. The nights are still tolerable but we've had a few afternoons that were a bit choking. But I get to eat a mango everyday (at least), which I'm enjoying immensely.

And from the end of my time in GM5, to relief, to 3 weeks of annual leave, I've now been in renal for 2 months. The last three months have just warped away from me and I have no idea where they went. Part of the reason time has gotten away from me was because of the uncertainty about next year. I had originally planned to take a year off to travel and work for MSF, and in fact had already applied to work for MSF and even got an interview. But somehow it was not to be. The college released a regulation update that mandated continuous uninterrupted training, and though I could apply for "special consideration", I ran the risk of being unemployed (or stuck somewhere horrible) if the special consideration was not approved.

Like the last time I faced an uncertain situation, I decided to leave it up to fate. I applied for two jobs only and decided that if I were not to get either, I would just go to Africa. One could call it a win-win situation - either I end up in a good ICU where I want to be, or in Africa where I want to be.... or one could call it a lose-lose situation - either I'm miserable back working in Sydney and actually want to be in Africa, or I drop out of the training program! True glass half-full or half-empty ness.

I felt almost nothing when I got those interview offers, and almost nothing while I was doing the RPA interview. I still felt nothing when RPA called and told me I had a job (shouldn't I have been ecstatic? bouncing off the walls? after all this is what I wanted all along..). It felt surreal, I felt detached from it all.
Even now it hasn't really sunken in. Though with the weather getting hotter (and more like the weather when I arrived in Darwin), the realisation that two thirds of my time in Darwin has gone has slightly indented in my mind. I can't imagine what will happen when I go back to Sydney, it will be the biggest culture shock!

The strange thing is, I've almost stopped dreaming. Once I dreamt I was in a patient's bladder watching the fungating tumour (with lots of flailing arms sticking out of the giant cauliflower like lesion), struggling to keep afloat in a sea of urine. Another time I dreamt I was being delivered a curry, one cube of meat at a time. But my dreams have faded somewhat and are not really very vivid. It's probably just sleep deprivation, or maybe it's too hot at night now. But I miss my dreams...