Welcome to New Zealand

Paul and I are settling in to our new place in Gore, New Zealand. It's been a fairly pleasant experience all around. After a frustrating flight - which included plane delays, lost luggage, and possible engine failure we made our way across the Pacific in once piece and got picked up by the CEO of the hospital at Invercargill. He took us out for dinner, and drank some beer. And we even got a fruit basket and a bouquet of flowers to welcome us as we arrived at the motel that we would be staying at for a couple days.

Gore is a small town of around 12-15,000 people. Many people here have jobs in the farming and/or dairy industry. The one thing I remembered learning about New Zealand was the greater number of sheep to people ratio in this country. And now seeing the huge rolling hills, sheep herds dotting the scenery it is a beautiful truth out here.

The weather is a bit odd to get used to as its winter here, and basically its kindof like Seattle where it just keeps on raining, snowing, or even hailing intermittently but then the sun pops out, and everything dries or melts within a couple hours.

We got set-up in a furnished house just about 4-5 blocks away from the hospital. So just a 10 minute walk to work. It's like grandma's house with multiple random knick knacks and 70's furniture. All the houses in the Southland seem to be notorious for the lack of central heating as it hasn't seemed yet caught on here. So we have multiple space heaters throughout the house to keep us warm in the evenings.

Paul and I have become meatatarians lately as the grocery shops and prices here are likely reflective of our areas industry. Beef, lamb, cheese, and mmm... bacon are quite plentiful. Vegetables are horrifically expensive at least during these winter months, and we saw tomatoes priced as high as $17.00 per kg. Ouch! Besides that we've eaten a lot of Cadbury chocolates, as one of the primary factories and birth centers of Cadbury started in Dunedin, NZ just about 2 hours from here.


Oh yes and we are working. Paul and I are working at the same health facility. The community hospital along with the clinic are attached to each other. The hospital itself is a 16 bed hospital with an emergency room (known as the A and E, accident and emergency) center. The clinic I'm in has been around for ages, though recently acquired by Gore Health from the previously established Dr. Park, who as gossip goes was a 'Workhorse' and his patients grew old with him so large geriatric population.

Currently the GP's at the health center are somewhat transient as Gore Health is still establishing their GP practice. 3 doctors currently at the practice, a South African doctor who's been in practice for 40+ years from Pretoria, but came out here as a semi-favor to the health center to maintain our numbers for patient visits, a previous Scottish locums now NZ resident who's part time, and myself.

So we're a multicultural crew with multiple accents. What's been nice about the Health center is the support staff are well skilled and helpful! My patient numbers have definitely doubled up to 23 patients per day though paperwork is definitely a lot less.

Medical issues i've seen include lots of group A strep, they don't have rapid strep tests here. Saw this gal who had a scarlatina rash but no sore throat or URI symptoms but ended up having sky high ASO titer who would have known. Paul's pulling contaminated nails out of a farmer's hand who got it caught between a cow horn and a fence, seeing acute abdomens, and freaking out that he'll see a pregnant woman or acutely ill child in the middle of the night (but if you're a doctor, you can do anything, right?).

Paul and I are planning several tramping (hiking) trips around the area. We've been to Bluff the oldest town in New Zealand, ate raw oysters, hiked along the southern coastline, visited the Cadbury factory in Dunedin(saw 1 ton of liquid chocolate fall 2 stories down a silo, known as the chocolate waterfall), and accosted goats to take their pictures along the sides of country roads after hiking on a nearby mountain.