Dr. John A. King describes being stranded in remote Australia during extreme weather: high winds, dust storms, then heavy rain. He pulled a hamstring with no nearby medical care, physio has long waits, and the MRI is five hours away in Alice Springs. He's considering trauma-medic training to handle emergencies alone.
It got a bit windy. Dust all coming, eh? Sky's all brown. Yeah, rain's coming, they say. So I pulled a tendon, bottom of the hamstring, left knee. I don't know what I was doing, but it's just painful as buggery. It'll be 7 weeks before a physio visits the town. 4 to 5 weeks before I can see an MRI in Alice. That's 5 hours away. There are no chiros in Tennant Creek. I can see a doctor next Thursday— next Tuesday at 11:30, and that's the only time, um, in the next 2 weeks that I can see a doctor. So it's reality, folks. Life in isolation. It's amazing what's happened. Australia had the best healthcare system in the world, and then, you know, apparently this is, um, this is the norm. Uh, you know, you've got to be in such a situation as to need an airlift, um, to get, to get the medical treatment you need. It's, uh, You know, doctors don't want to come out this far. They don't want to work in an isolated community. Hence the need for self-sufficiency. I think I might do like a trauma medic course or something like that. I think that would be— I think that's a good thing. I think that'd be a good thing to do, not only for myself but anyone else you meet. Because if you think of it, like Just on the trip up here, you know, I was— there was times where I was 3 hours from any large or sustainable population that had a sufficient hospital. Everything else would have been medical lift, which would have been a 2 to 3 hour wait anyway. So So if you can't handle it yourself, uh, you're kind of buggered. Coming down pretty heavy. Rooftops are getting wet. I got the walls up, but, uh, I've got to line them still. Tent's holding up okay. A lot of water coming in over there. I need to try and fix that up. I may need to channel most of that water around the tent. It's sort of all been pooling up here, under here. So I've managed to move it around a little bit and, um, probably needs to go next. I don't know what to do. Probably just need to buy a hoe from town and just dig that trench out a little bit more.
