Leave Approved

It was a sad day yesterday - my last day at the lovely clinic I have been working at for more than one year, Monbulk Family Clinic. It has been such a special experience working there - a truly happy, united place with wonderful receptionists, excellent doctors, and the most kind-hearted practice nurse ever. Run by my delightfully eccentric supervisor John Gruner and his wife Kirsti, it was a happy place to work at and made for sad goodbyes yesterday. Their parting gift to me, apart from flowers and a lovely lunch, was an exceptionally generous donation of surgical equipment, rustled up in no time (my request being a last minute thing, as always). So I am going to Nepal with needle holders, needles and thread to sew up cuts, gauze, dressings, local anaesthetic and syringes… I would have been happy with just the needle and thread sets (My request was for three but I got ten!!) but was overwhelmed by the needle holders too (They are steel, not disposable, and will make my job much much easier to do!!)

Thank you Monbulk for the memories and for the generosity. As Martine says, you will all go to heaven for sure!

We are overwhelmed by the generosity of Alphapharm, an Australian pharmaceutical company that makes generic medications. I’ve always found their telephone reps to be very helpful when I’ve rung up with queries on my patients’ behalf. Robyn Ronai, Alphapharm’s media representative, responded with admirable speed to my request for a host of antibiotics, antiparasitics, asthma medications and more, and she has already organised for a large box of medicines to be delivered on Friday - how exciting!

It’s not the first time Alphapharm have done a similar thing - they have donated to many medical missions like mine, and participate in OPAL (Overseas Pharmaceutical Aid Limited), which is a service that many volunteer organisations use to get medications for their missions. They also support Australian charities like the Variety club. You can view their website on www.alphapharm.com.au

This is all great news as I am rather apprehensive about turning up to remote villages armed with only my stethoscope, my hands and my eyes, and with nary a nurse to help me! With Alphapharm’s generosity, I will have a deep box of tricks to turn me into the miracle worker that the villagers hope I will be. Of course there is nothing that can subsitute for peace in the country - lack of which hinders the improvement of the standard of health and living of the Nepalese people. But hope will spread slowly and surely - I am positive of this.

My clinic, Gundu, Nepal
I have heard back from Michael today about the village that we are going to be volunteering at. It is called Gundu, and the photos below tell a little of its story. There is a small clinic there but only a nurse and only at certain times. There are also other villages nearby with no health facilities and where the people are extremely poor.

Today we have been overwhelmed by the generosity of our family and friends who are gathering pens, toys, clothes and donating money (All this non tax deductible too, as we are not a registered charity). I couldn’t possibly think of a more needy place to bring these generous gifts to.

We were fortunate enough to have come across a fantastic woman called Elsie James, who has organised our treks for us down to the finest details.

She is Canadian and spends a lot of time in Nepal, organising humanitarian things as far as I can tell. Elsie obviously knows a lot about trekking as well and has been such a valuable source of information on how to plan our treks down to a tailored day-to-day itinerary.

The trekking company she is organising our treks through is Ecological Treks and Tours www.nepaltreks4u.com

We decided on two treks - the Annapurna Circuit, which takes 19 days and over the formidable pass of Thorung La at 5400m (note: more than half way to Everest!!), and the Everest Base Camp trek, which takes about 15 days and which doesn’t actually take us to the foot of Everest per se (you can’t see Everest from Base Camp) but we will get good views of Everest from the summit of Kala Pattar.

They’re both classic Nepal treks, and we will be staying in “tea houses” along the way - they are little guest houses that are tacked on to a family home, and usually consist of a basic room with a cement floor, two plank beds, and two wonderfully thick quilts that make for the best sleep ever! Electricity supply and toilet facilities are fairly basic (sometimes non-existent - once we were sent to bed with a candle and a matchbox for lighting!)

We are proud to introduce sanofi-aventis, who make Gastrolyte, as a sponsor of our volunteer placement. They have kindly provided us with 20 boxes of Paracetamol, 10 boxes of Metronidazole (An antiparasitic drug, very useful) and the best thing - 25 boxes of Gastrolye (essential and lifesaving for little children suffering from diarrhoea). They have a long history of contributing to the community, including partnering with the World Health Organisation to fight tropical diseases in places like Africa, partnering with the Nelson Mandela Foundation to fight TB, and of course humanitarian product donations and usually on a far larger scale than ours! Their representative Linda Horne was excellent in approving my request for medications at such short notice - She got back to me a day later asking for a delivery address!!

You can read about sanofi-aventis and the community at Sanofi-Aventis website

Product donations like these will mean that I will be a far more effective doctor. Affordability of simple antibiotics is the main barrier to people getting well in Nepal. They suffer from mainly infectious diseases like gastro, chest infections, skin infections, eye infections etc and often cannot afford to pay for medicines. What good will I be if they cannot afford to pay? With these generous donations, essential medicines will be provided for free, and the Gastrolyte will certainly save some kids’ lives.

V is working very hard to get the new Mcity site up and running in the next 2 weeks. He hasn’t had much time to look into the volunteer situation so it’s been my pleasure to do so. Today I got a second email from Michael Hess, an American who sold his Florida property and now spends his time running an orphanage called Papa’s Home, a school and volunteer program in a small village just outside Kathmandu. He has offered us some interesting placements, and I spent this evening looking at his websites, www.volunteernepal.com and www.nepalorphanshome.org

I fell in love with all the smiling faces of the 34 orphans at the home. We have seen those same faces, on the beautiful children we met on our treks. Those children had next to nothing, but welcomed us everywhere we went with the most heartbreaking generosity. I shall never forget the offer of two snotty-nosed children just outside Tikhedunga, who cried out to us, “Namaste! You want stick??” and one tiny girl, who yelled out “Namaste!” then scurried over to the hedge, plucked a few miniscule flowers and held them out to me with a beaming smile on her cherubic face.

It is difficult to find time to do the right thing. Life seems so full of things to do – 2006 flashed past before we knew it. We seem to be forever striving for an even better career – V and I have worked so hard over the past year, with exams to pass, research papers to write, new websites to launch, and new projects to be finished. We have put off doing the right thing for so long – always waiting for “the right time”. There isn’t going to be a perfect time, and something is telling us we have to go now. Even so, we are only finding 2 weeks to do this. I feel a little guilty about this. I also feel apprehensive – Will I really make a difference? What if I am not good enough to make a difference? Will I be out of my depth there?

As I write this, our website isn’t even up yet. I’m writing this on a Word document. Poor V has been working so hard he has not had time to set it up for me. But we plan to, very soon. Our plan is to have a website that informs people about what we are doing and why we are doing it. It’s a way of bringing attention to a needy and worthy and absolutely beautiful country that we fell in love with some four years ago, when V proposed to me on at Ghorepani, after we had climbed Poon Hill at sunrise, the highest part of our short trek. We spent two wonderful weeks in Nepal and left with knowledge that we would be back. Perhaps these 2 weeks of volunteer work will be like thanking the Nepalese people for the memories of our first two weeks there.

I have to end here with a funny story from our 2002 trip. V and I were born in Malaysia but are Chinese in ethnicity. We do resemble the Nepalese people a little, and being Asian we look far younger than our actual years. We had arrived in Tikhedunga early one afternoon and went to explore the village. We ended up at the top of a tiny waterfall/stream, which was under a long suspension bridge. I remember sitting on the rocks folding paper boats and sailing them down the waterfall. Not many of them made it down intact! Some trekkers may know this bridge as the one that you cross at the end of a steep descent from Ghorepani, near the end of the Annapurna Circuit trek. We took to waving to the trekkers crossing the bridge and yelling out “Namaste!” They were quite charmed by this and waved back and greeted us in return. I have no doubt that they thought we were a pair of delightful Nepalese children instead of two trekkers from Australia!

Depa, one of the orphans from Papa’s Home

CJ has never been a particularly active person, and up to a few years ago could not even jog for longer than five minutes. She was roped into going to Nepal by her then boyfriend Vincent in 2002. She had her first taste of trekking there, loved it, and spent the next few weeks reading about Everest summits and mountaineering. She has no aspirations to tackle mountaineering, but she does enjoy the active life now much more than she ever did.
Apart from trekking, she also enjoys snowboarding, and has been to ski resorts in Australia, New Zealand and Japan. She also enjoys cooking for Vincent, now her husband, as well as travelling, karaoke, reading investment books, and lying about the house in general. She does not like housework, spiders or heights.
By day she is a mild-mannered doctor, working in a family clinic in the outskirts of Melbourne, Australia. Her special interests are acupuncture and Chinese herbal medicine, and she took three years off from 2001 to study Traditional Chinese Medicine full time at university.
She was born in Malaysia and her ancestors came from China. She lives with her husband Vincent in Melbourne, and her parents, brother and sister-in-law and adorable niece Emma live in Perth.

Vincent has no time to write his profile so I am doing it for him. Vincent’s motto goes something along the lines of “If it hurts it will make you stronger” and he enjoys martial arts (Wing Chun and Tai Ji), body boarding, snowboarding, and drinking sake. His dream would be to live in Canada and snowboard every weekend, or else to spend a season just snowboarding at different resorts around the world. He also enjoys food, and will try anything if it is the local specialty, and he especially loves Middle Eastern food, Raju’s roti canai, teh tarik, and anything with chorizo in it.

By day (and often at night too) he runs several websites, including a successful directory of entertainment in Melbourne, though his aim is to be unchained from the computer and chase the waves (or the snow) while his websites run themselves (or, someone else runs them). He was also born in Malaysia and his dad, sister and her four kids still live in KL. He dislikes boredom, people who copy ideas, and green vegetables.

I went to the Travel Doctor clinic yesterday to get my last rabies shot. It wasn’t the Melbourne clinic but the Perth (Fremantle) one, as I am visiting family in Perth this weekend.

The doctor met with me before the nurse gave me my shot, ostensibly for legal reasons, but really just to have a chat! He gave me a long handout on altitude sickness, and then proceeded to give me a short version of a presentation he was about to give on GP happiness and wellbeing.

It’s a well known fact to the medical profession that there are a lot of unhappy and burnt out GPs - apparently they tend to be in the 35-49 yo age group, male, and more likely to be the practice principal and work longer hours. Nothing surprising.

He did talk a lot about how GPs could “keep the hot air balloon afloat”, as he called it. It was a lovely acronym called HAPPINESS, and I can’t remember all of it, but our big trip to Nepal does cover a lot of it, which is really why I am doing this, I think… to remain a sane and happy doctor?!?! Some of the things I remember are:

Exercise - I don’t think we will ever be as active as we will be on this trip, with 6 weeks of trekking! Plus the “training” that we are supposed to be doing beforehand (which seems to have slipped off a little, but never mind… I did go for a 6km run yesterday). My approach to “holidays” has slowly changed from wanting to do nothing to wanting to do everything (physically), and hopefully this will translate to a lifelong commitment to keeping active, which is vital in staying happy and sane.

Nurture important relationships - This will be the only trip that V and I will make this year that is just the two of us! All our trips recently have been with other people, which is lots of fun, of course, but this trip is different… Hopefully our relationship will be “nurtured” during the trip!

Spirituality - refers to seeing the meaning in life and in doing the things that you are doing, and believing in some higher power or force than yourself. This doens’t have to mean a religious higher power, although many people do find this highly spiritual of course. For me, spirituality on this trip will mean having a respect for the awesome power of nature - the towering mountain ranges of the Himalayas, and Mt Everest. There will also be lots of time spent away from computers, email, schedules, bills, appointments, and all the trappings of our busy modern life, time spent in meditative hard slog, time spent in simple rhythms of wake, walk, eat, sleep - and time to remember that there is more to life than the rat race that we are running.

Hmmm I cannot seem to remember what the Ps stand for?!

So that’s it. I am making this trip to save my career!