I live in a beautiful country

I've just moved everything home in preparation for the big move - to London - and took some photos of what I'm leaving behind. My last day at work was beautiful so I took some photos.

Driving to work

Work...

Work carpark...

Driving home!

Yes, that is a cyclist on the highway. Yes, they are allowed to be there.

I drove up from Wellington with a very fully laden car. It was not the most fun 7 hour trip of my life, mainly because everything was crammed in and spilling over into the space for the driver and passenger...a testament to how much stuff I have, I think.

Wellington - the view from my balcony

Heading up the coast...

Obligatory sheep and cows

Driving into some rain on the Desert Road

Turangi

Lake Taupo

Thankfully it was great weather for driving for the most part and the weather continued to hold. I'm now frantically stressing and packing for London (which has consumed most of the last 2 months to be fair...) but will hopefully update this a bit more once I'm there!

Things I have learnt about myself so far.

I had a conversation with my flatmate whilst on nights which went, in part, as follows:

"How was your night?"
"It was okay. One went to ICU. The one from ICU last night died after I started my shift."
"Oh no, that's terrible!"
"Yeah, sadly we couldn't fix him."

This gave me pause for thought - to me, it was just a casual conversation about work, but to my flatmate, it was really a big deal that someone had died. Which of course, made me wonder - have I stopped caring about the people I meet and look after?

When I first started freaking out about "being a doctor" in my final years of medical school, I was more worried that I would be too emotional and burn out caring about everyone. This was probably true right at the start, but wallowing in guilt whenever something bad happened and having existential crises whenever a patient died thankfully resolved itself in the first 6 months of work.

The reason that this man dying didn't make me go "oh, that's horrible" the day after I'd watched him go from "a guy with constipation" to "probably a perforation", was because there was nothing we could do to make him well again. Thus, the "best" outcome was that he was kept as pain-free and undistressed as possible at the end of his life. I honestly think I did the best that I could for this man in the set of fairly crap circumstances he was thrown - and because of this, I don't feel upset because he died. It was still sudden, and unexpected, and a crappy set of things for him to have happen - but I don't feel the need to mourn him or break down in tears because of it, because at the end of the day, we did the best we could with what we had.

So - I haven't had some big lightbulb moment or extreme revelation. I don't think I've stopped caring. Instead, I think that I've just gradually come around to appreciating the positives of being alive, the things that I can do, and the way that you can make a difference, even if you can't always change things to how you want them to be.

A new friend appears!

This cat belongs to one of the neighbours down the road and is simply the cuddliest thing ever in the suburb.

In which it is evident that piles of paper and plastic on the floor are not my priority

Nor is making my bed, evidently.