Friday, 13th May 2011

Another month has zoomed past and we are almost halfway through another one! I have just had 2 weeks off for Easter holidays, the first week I stayed in Newcastle and the last week I flew to Austria to visit friends and family and met up with my mom who was also there.

April was a lovely month as the weather has turned lovely and warm in Newcastle (except for the odd day or so of drizzle as per usual) and with all the flowers blooming and the longer sunlight hours I am feeling energised and looking forward to weekends where I can undertake outings to make the most of these gorgeous days! I’ve also taken long walks in our nearby parks on afternoons that I have had off, all that was missing was having a dog or two to walk with me, though I enjoy watching the antics of the dogs who are being walked in the park while I am there!

On one of the weekends I also went for a long walk along the coast near Newcastle with Geoff, starting from Tynemouth to Whitley Bay. It was lovely and warm with blue skies, and we stopped off halfway for some Gingerbread Latte at a Cafe on the beach. Yum!

Over the Easter weekend Geoff also taught me how to make sushi (though my rolls tended to unroll and the rice kept sticking to my fingers! So I will need much more practice!) and they were very delicious if I do say so myself! :) We also spent the afternoon of Easter Sunday weeding on his allotment (the dandelions were threatening to take over all the veggie beds), which is very dirty work but very good exercise as my muscles informed me the next day.

Nicola and I also visited another National Trust site in Northumberland called Cragside just before Easter.

This info was taken from Wikipedia about it:

Cragside is a country house in the civil parish of Cartington in Northumberland, England. It was the first house in the world to be lit using hydroelectric power. Built into a rocky hillside above a 4 km² forest garden, it was the country home of Lord Armstrong and has been in the care of the National Trust since 1977.

Cragside, named after Cragend Hill above the house, was built in 1863 as a modest two-storey country lodge, but was subsequently extended to designs by Norman Shaw, transforming it into an elaborate mansion in the Free Tudor style. At one point, the building included an astronomical observatory and a scientific laboratory.

In 1868, a hydraulic engine was installed, with water being used to power labour-saving machines such as laundry equipment, a rotisserie and a hydraulic lift. In 1870, water from one of the estate's lakes was used to drive a Siemens dynamo in what was the world's first hydroelectric power station. The resultant electricity was used to power an arc lamp installed in the Gallery in 1878. The arc lamp was replaced in 1880 by Joseph Swan's incandescent lamps in what Swan considered 'the first proper installation' of electric lighting.

The generators, which also provided power for the farm buildings on the estate, were constantly extended and improved to match the increasing electrical demand in the house.

The Grade I listed house is surrounded by one of Europe's largest rock gardens, a large number of rhododendrons and a large collection of mostly coniferous trees.

I have also been catching up on my scrapbooking recently in my spare time (as I haven’t done anything with my photos since coming to the UK) but have moved with the times and am doing it all digitally now. The above are examples of how I now put my photos together. I then have them printed out on photo paper in nearly A4 size and can put them in a nice album.

Rotation wise I am still at the GP out in the countryside doing Integrative Medicine. She had a little baby boy just before the Easter holidays and since she works from home I have been getting a lot of cuddle time with him in the corner while she consults with the patients. He’s as good as gold as well!

In my last update I wrote that I was off to sit in on an acupuncturist’s consultations for two days. These went well and the acupuncturist was a lovely man and we had long discussions about Chinese medicine, though it had been so long since I had studied it that it was all very vague in my memory!

I’ve also done a few more shifts, one of them a nightshift on the Urology ward... basically I emptied catheters the whole night, but it was a quiet shift and I got to sit down quite a bit which my feet were pleased about.

And tonight a group of us are off to “The Late Shows” in Newcastle where all the museums and galleries stay open until midnight tonight and tomorrow night, and its all free entry. Should be fun and I’ll let you know how it went in my next update.

And that’s all my news so far. I finish this rotation in 2 weeks (end of this month) and then my 4^th year of medicine is finished!!! I then move in with Abby, Fiona and Sahira just around the corner (I’m looking forward to living with them but dreading the packing!) and then in mid-June I go to Austria for 2 months where I will be completing my elective – the first 4 weeks in a hospital and the next 4 weeks at a GP’s – seeing what the medical system in Austria is like. And in August it will be 3 years since I arrived in the UK too... wow!