Back to Hervey Bay

It’s the beginning of the second-to-last rotation: obstetrics and gynecology. I will be spending the first four weeks of the eight-week rotation back in my old haunt Hervey Bay.

The med school is putting me and another fourth year up in a house in a new subdivision just behind the hospital. Driving down the new road behind the hospital, I can’t help but notice that the neighborhood in front of me could have been airlifted straight out of Anywhere, USA, and plopped down in the middle of Australia. The same denuded landscape that had been clear cut to make way for cookie cutter houses, the same manicured lawns with feeble saplings propped up by supporting frames, the same deserted streets in which the only indication of human inhabitation are the cars parked in the driveway. The elegantly designed Queenslanders that are built and oriented to suit the warm and humid Queensland climate have given way to the cheaply and massed produced prefab homes. Another unique regional feature has died a quiet death by the forces of McDonaldization of the Western world.

This sterile neighborhood will be my home for the next four weeks.

In the morning, I walk over to Hervey Bay Hospital that had grown so familiar to me last year. Walking down the central corridor like I had countless times before, I keep running into junior and senior doctors who had taught me last year. To my surprise, they all recognize me and stop to chat. Sure, there were only ten of us here last year, so they didn’t have to deal with a thousand med students coming through day in day out. But stopping to chat with a lowly medical student? That’s way beyond what I’d expect big shot doctors would do. And yet, there I am, shooting the breeze with the head of surgery, being asked about my elective in Zambia by the consultant in medicine, listening to another surgeon recounting his OB/GYN rotation during medical school.

It’s nice to be back in Hervey Bay.