This morning I was scheduled to tag along with Lisa, one of the nurse's that runs a well-women's clinic at North Yarra. However, when I got there, she and the other nurses in the office (as well as Joyce, one of the front desk workers) were gathering their things (along with some home-made picket signs) and heading off to a demonstration in the city. They said I could tag along, so I did.

Turns out this was a big demonstration that was later reported to have some 100,000 or more people out demonstrating throughout Melbourne. It consisted of all different types of unions, like nurses, firemen, metal workers, etc (I wound up walking with the nurses, the ANF - Australian Nursing Federation I think) The reason behind the demonstration was that the conservative party (ironically called the Liberal party) was about to take control of both houses of Parliament the next day. The prime minister was also liberal (Howard), so the liberals had a lot of power to do what they wanted. And the unions fear that this power will be used to crack down on them (it is perceived that labor unions have a lot of power in Australia).

Apparently the opposing party to the Liberals is "Labor" and they have no leadership and no strong ideas of their own. Sounds a little familiar to what's going on in the States in fact.

In the process I got to meet Victoria, another nurse at North Yarra. She's actually leaving in a couple weeks to work at another community health clinic in the city. Something to do with the CEO at North Yarra, but I don't know what. It seems from the rumblings I've heard that many people aren't too happy with her (the CEO), but I'm not sure as to why.

Also chatted with Joyce, one of the receptionists at North Yarra. It's no easy job she has, apparently the drug users don't mind swearing at the front desk people or even threatening their lives. And somehow they like to blame the front desk people for their drug habit. She also runs into all the cultural issues since the patient (whoops, I mean 'client', they use 'clients' instead of patients here as the more politically correct term...something to do with this presenting a more balanced power situation between doctors and patients/clients.) For example, there are some new female patients from Somalia who are from the upper classes there. In their culture, they look down upon women servants (like the people who work the front desk of a doctor's office) and that leads to tension when they come into the clinic.

Also met Jean-Carlo, a transplanted Italian in Australia. He's a nurse and quite politically active for the left. Interesting character, and I will be spending much of tomorrow with him as he takes 8 socially isolated men out on a trip, so I will leave that for tomorrow. Ozzie-ism:
'Partner' is used by everyone (doctors and patients) to describe girlfriend's, boyfriends, husbands, wives, etc. Something that's just catching on in the States I guess, altho Dr. Jacka is not a huge fan of it. He think that it oftens causes you to lose information about the gender of the partner.

Worked with Dr. Jacka in the afternoon at Smith St. This is where the currently injecting drug users tend to go, so you might expect them to be a little more difficult to handle (the day before, for instance, a guy named Simon got in a huge fight with another patient...it spilled outside, blood got on someone's care, the next door Italian restaurant called the police and said they were going to get the Smith St. clinic shut down). Altho actually, it wasn't so wild this afternoon. One guy, named David, did come in with quite a story of his life which included a six month stint of Guillam-Barre syndrome, a viral polyneuropathy that causes paralysis and can be life threatening if respiratory muscles get involved. His story was suspicious apparently because he spoke of getting severely painful injections of gammaglobulin, and such injections should be innocuous enough. He also talked about being strapped to a table for 2 months. Dr. Jacka's comment was that there is no worse patient to get a serious disease like GBS than a psychiatric patient. I imagine it's a lot like the worst possible cultural clash you can imagine...where rational arguments about treatment options mean nothing to someone who can't thing rationally.

That night I also went on 3 home visits with Dr. Jacka. The living room of the first lady was amazing...furniture that was hard to recognize, pictures from way way back. Then there was David who wanted to "thicken" his tea because his tea-mates required thickened tea (thickened to make less of a chance of it going down the wrong pipe due to glottal incompetence). He insisted it tasted better thickened, altho the thickening had no taste. The last lady was on oxygen and was having difficulty breathing. Dr. Jacka mentioned something about using the jugular vein to gauge the fluid level in a person, but I must say that I didn't quite understand it.