There is, to my great disappointment, no indication that I'm going to see a polar bear while I'm up here at all. I've seen a bunch of them as rugs with their heads still on them in various bars and stuff in town, but that's about it. I'm told they are quite big and quite dangerous, and they are, without a doubt, one of the few animals left on earth that considers humans to be fair game as prey. In January, there were apparently a mom bear and two cubs that were hanging around the outskirts of Iqaluit that wouldn't go away, so the city had to shoot them, b/c they would've started hunting humans. Also, I've heard many stories of polar bears: easily reaching 10 to 12 feet in height on their hind legs (holy crap!!!), able to look into second story windows... guys having to stay underneath their trucks for six or seven hours until the polar bear got tired of them and went away... the sheer stupidity to go travelling outside of towns without very strong and big guns, b/c then you're just asking for trouble from polar bears... pretty scary! There was another story that I was told about one guy who saw a polar bear coming towards him, started shooting at him from 20 feet away, but the bear finally didn't die until 2 feet in front of him! Scary!
On the other hand, in my never-ending saga of getting a huge kick out of visiting Chinese restaurants in the most unlikely places... there are about 30 Chinese people living up here. However, most of the time they pass for Inuk, so it kinda doesn't matter, but they do sell bok choy, oyster sauce, a whole range of Lee Kum Kee sauces (ha ha ha, Hary...) and even dried straw mushrooms in the supermarket (!). I'm supposed to be going out for Chinese food in the next few days at the only Chinese resto in town, so we'll see how that goes... :P
Hope all is well!!!
WARNING: The rest of this postcard will only really be applicable to the medicine people in the crowd... sorry... so potentially boring stuff ahead... You can skip the rest if you'd like :)
I must say, sometimes it's quite discouraging to be working in these environments, even though the locales themselves might be quite exotic. However, to see active TB, SIDS, ++++ ODs, STDs++++, tons of bilat. perf'd TMs, bottle caries etc etc etc in CANADA, of all places... it kind of wears down on you after a while... I think also it doesn't help a lot that I feel like a bit of a walk-in doc, so I only see them come in, but I don't necessarily see how they turn out.. part of it has to do with the fact that preventative care doesn't really register with this culture, and secondly, since the consultants only come up once or twice a year, the consult note doesn't come back for a year or so... like on little girl I just saw who's got bilat perf'd TMs with chronic d/c: there's no audiology up here, we're not going to fly her down for audiology, ENT's not coming for another five months, and there are hundreds of little kids with hearing loss/perf TMs/ chronic OM to be seen as well... what the heck to do with that? Do the tympanoplasties myself???
On the plus side, I suppose, I haven't really seen that much in the way of acute internal stuff. No AMIs, CVAs, well, at least not a lot (we've got one CHFer on the floor, but that's about it). Actually, there haven't been that many MVAs either, but with the speed limit being 30, I guess it's kinda hard to do, though there are lots of skidoo trauma... I dunno, it's just kinda frustrating with the lack of continuity of care and the lack of resources here... Actually, I think it's the lack of continuity that's the big problem... like the one woman I had to cut off her codeine cause I was the only one who bothered to look back in her chart and realized that she'd been getting about 800-900 codeine tabs a year for the past three years! (Well, besides the fact that I'm not big on prescription narcotics for non-CA pain...)... I dunno, gripe gripe gripe... :P ... thanks for the ASCM-like debriefing, guys... :P
Love you!
julia
Wednesday, March 24, 2004
Saturday, March 20, 2004
Nunavut IV
OK, so really, to be completely honest, the main reason why I wanted to come up here is because the babies are soooooo freaking cute!!! Also, there are tons and tons of them; I'm delivering one every two days or so, although this hospital averages about 1.5 per day or so. They are sooo round and soft (I mean, I've been told that I'm pretty soft myself, but these kids feel like goose down or something :) )! I'm trying to remember to take some pics of the kids, cause frankly they're funny in their fur hats and their kamiks :)...
Some of you have been asking what the heck I've been eating out here: caribou? Polar bear? walrus?? etc etc... good question! :P Actually, they are incredibly gracious to me here and provide my meals in the hospital caf, which is actually totally not as bad as it sounds. A lot of town comes here to eat for their meals actually; today I had striploin steak for lunch... I think that's nutty! :) It's quite nice as you get to meet a bunch of folks from town over lunch... However, I have had arctic char a lot (which is apparently a cousin of the salmon, and they do taste quite similar), I've tried caribou too (I dunno; tastes like chicken?? Maybe a musky beef? I dunno... everything tastes like chicken, doesn't it?). Muktuk is another story... (that's seal blubber)... apparently I will get a chance to try it (so the guys in the caf promise me), as long as I'm prepared to chew for a couple of hours... apparently it's like licorice, but you can't really chew through it, you just kind gotta let it slide down.... uhhh, that doesn't sound terribly appetizing nor nutritious, for that matter...
At any rate, the guys in the kitchen are great here, and incredible gentlemen, which is just as well, since food prices here are extravagant at best... part of it is b/c there's really only one store to buy your food at, so being a monopoly helps at jacking up prices, as well as transportation costs to bring fresh produce etc up here. Most food costs about 2-3 times more than it would down south. I went for a tour of the store (it's the biggest store in Iqaluit, possibly all of Nunavut... I can't believe I was a tourist in a supermarket in Canada, now that's sad and pathetic, possibly comparable to visiting IKEA, right??? ... :P ) the other day: Bananas cost about $1 each, my precioussss Vector cereal costs $15 a box, a loaf of Wonder bread costs $7, a ten piece bucket of KFC is $30... crazy crazy... one of my friends up here says that buying $600-700 worth of groceries a week for a small family is not surprising...
Pop and chips, however, are only marginally more expensive than they are down south, which makes me think conspiracy theory all over the place. The Inuit have notoriously high rates of obesity, diabetes and realllllly bad dental problems (Nathan, Steve... they could use you up here!), which I KNOW the pop and chips are not helping to prevent... sadly, for some reason, babies start getting pop in their bottles when they hit about 5 or six months, which I totally don't understand... So they're still really really really cute... just that their teeth start rotting before they've even come up... ewwwww....
Hope you're all well! Love you!
julia
Some of you have been asking what the heck I've been eating out here: caribou? Polar bear? walrus?? etc etc... good question! :P Actually, they are incredibly gracious to me here and provide my meals in the hospital caf, which is actually totally not as bad as it sounds. A lot of town comes here to eat for their meals actually; today I had striploin steak for lunch... I think that's nutty! :) It's quite nice as you get to meet a bunch of folks from town over lunch... However, I have had arctic char a lot (which is apparently a cousin of the salmon, and they do taste quite similar), I've tried caribou too (I dunno; tastes like chicken?? Maybe a musky beef? I dunno... everything tastes like chicken, doesn't it?). Muktuk is another story... (that's seal blubber)... apparently I will get a chance to try it (so the guys in the caf promise me), as long as I'm prepared to chew for a couple of hours... apparently it's like licorice, but you can't really chew through it, you just kind gotta let it slide down.... uhhh, that doesn't sound terribly appetizing nor nutritious, for that matter...
At any rate, the guys in the kitchen are great here, and incredible gentlemen, which is just as well, since food prices here are extravagant at best... part of it is b/c there's really only one store to buy your food at, so being a monopoly helps at jacking up prices, as well as transportation costs to bring fresh produce etc up here. Most food costs about 2-3 times more than it would down south. I went for a tour of the store (it's the biggest store in Iqaluit, possibly all of Nunavut... I can't believe I was a tourist in a supermarket in Canada, now that's sad and pathetic, possibly comparable to visiting IKEA, right??? ... :P ) the other day: Bananas cost about $1 each, my precioussss Vector cereal costs $15 a box, a loaf of Wonder bread costs $7, a ten piece bucket of KFC is $30... crazy crazy... one of my friends up here says that buying $600-700 worth of groceries a week for a small family is not surprising...
Pop and chips, however, are only marginally more expensive than they are down south, which makes me think conspiracy theory all over the place. The Inuit have notoriously high rates of obesity, diabetes and realllllly bad dental problems (Nathan, Steve... they could use you up here!), which I KNOW the pop and chips are not helping to prevent... sadly, for some reason, babies start getting pop in their bottles when they hit about 5 or six months, which I totally don't understand... So they're still really really really cute... just that their teeth start rotting before they've even come up... ewwwww....
Hope you're all well! Love you!
julia
Wednesday, March 17, 2004
Nunavut III
The snow here isn't as 'snowy' as all that, really. I wouldn't really describe it as 'snowy'. "Snowy" is kind of like how it was last winter in Ottawa, or how it was during the TO storm of '99. Yes, there's a lot of snow here, but it just kind of is brushed onto the rocks. So you kinda see the rocks jutting out here and there in the snow, or, at least, the snowbanks look kind of jaggedy, but there's not really a lot of snow, per se. The locals have told me that there's actually not that much snow up here at all (?What??? But everything's white!). This is problematic for me, as it hurts just that much more when you slip and fall. It's a good thing I'm not a little old lady, otherwise, I'm pretty sure I might've broken something by now...
A few facts about Iqaluit and Nunavut, as I've noticed sommmmme people (not to mention any names... :) ) thought I was going to the Yukon, or Yellowknife or close to Alaska... I thought most of us took Gr. 9 geography, right? though someone here reminded me that Nunavut didn't exactly exist when most of us went through Gr. 9...
The territory of Nunavut was created on April 1, 1999, after years of negotiation with the feds. With the creation of this territory, the Inuit have forever relinquished the right for any further land claims with the Canadian gov't. Which is not too bad, really, as the Inuit had negotiated land development claims, etc, giving them the lion's share of diamond, gold and silver development in the north. (Which, as a side note, d/t some gov't funding changes, etc etc, the price of Canadian diamonds mayyyyy shoot wayyyy up in 2005 (maybe, maybe), so if you were thinking about getting one, 2004 might be a better idea to purchase one... just FYI...) Nunavut takes up a grand total of 20% of Canada's land mass, but only has about 28,000 people in the territory, approximately 85% of which are Inuit (or Inuk), the rest, I'm presuming, being gov't workers.. :P Although really, most of the jobs requiring an education do belong to those from outside of the territory, as there aren't that many Inuit who have enough education to hold the higher-ranking jobs (there are a lot of social and political issues here wrt how they're planning on being able to deal with that now and in the future, but that's not primary to this discussion today). There is a total of 20km of highway in the entire territory, which is not even in Iqaluit... it's actually up north from a small community that leads up to an abandoned mine... (Don't ask me why. I betcha nobody really knows why either... it's not a terribly useful highway). And, I've also learned, very few to no Inuit actually lives on the land 100% of the time at all; mostly everyone lives in one of the housing communities built and stretched out over Nunavut. So no iglus, unless someone's got a hankering to go hunting far far out... Iqaluit itself has about 6000 people in it, of which only about 60% are Inuit. There are two gas stations, three banks, one post office, one KFC and one Pizza Hut. There's other things too, but I just thought I would give you the general idea :P So there you go, a bit of Canadiana for y'all...
On a 'cool!' kind of note: I'm going to be helping lead a children's choir for an Easter service out here, which I find terribly exciting! (So see, guys, kind of in a REALLY oblique way, I AM kind of doing the Messiah, kind of, uhh, yeah.... :P )
Hope you are well!
julia
A few facts about Iqaluit and Nunavut, as I've noticed sommmmme people (not to mention any names... :) ) thought I was going to the Yukon, or Yellowknife or close to Alaska... I thought most of us took Gr. 9 geography, right? though someone here reminded me that Nunavut didn't exactly exist when most of us went through Gr. 9...
The territory of Nunavut was created on April 1, 1999, after years of negotiation with the feds. With the creation of this territory, the Inuit have forever relinquished the right for any further land claims with the Canadian gov't. Which is not too bad, really, as the Inuit had negotiated land development claims, etc, giving them the lion's share of diamond, gold and silver development in the north. (Which, as a side note, d/t some gov't funding changes, etc etc, the price of Canadian diamonds mayyyyy shoot wayyyy up in 2005 (maybe, maybe), so if you were thinking about getting one, 2004 might be a better idea to purchase one... just FYI...) Nunavut takes up a grand total of 20% of Canada's land mass, but only has about 28,000 people in the territory, approximately 85% of which are Inuit (or Inuk), the rest, I'm presuming, being gov't workers.. :P Although really, most of the jobs requiring an education do belong to those from outside of the territory, as there aren't that many Inuit who have enough education to hold the higher-ranking jobs (there are a lot of social and political issues here wrt how they're planning on being able to deal with that now and in the future, but that's not primary to this discussion today). There is a total of 20km of highway in the entire territory, which is not even in Iqaluit... it's actually up north from a small community that leads up to an abandoned mine... (Don't ask me why. I betcha nobody really knows why either... it's not a terribly useful highway). And, I've also learned, very few to no Inuit actually lives on the land 100% of the time at all; mostly everyone lives in one of the housing communities built and stretched out over Nunavut. So no iglus, unless someone's got a hankering to go hunting far far out... Iqaluit itself has about 6000 people in it, of which only about 60% are Inuit. There are two gas stations, three banks, one post office, one KFC and one Pizza Hut. There's other things too, but I just thought I would give you the general idea :P So there you go, a bit of Canadiana for y'all...
On a 'cool!' kind of note: I'm going to be helping lead a children's choir for an Easter service out here, which I find terribly exciting! (So see, guys, kind of in a REALLY oblique way, I AM kind of doing the Messiah, kind of, uhh, yeah.... :P )
Hope you are well!
julia
Saturday, March 13, 2004
Nunavut II
As some of you know, it went down to -60/-70 with the windchill yesterday. I had no idea people would even live in those kinds of temperatures. I must say, that's either great ingenuity or great stupidity on the part of the Inuit to have traversed the Russian/Alaskan divide to come north... I would've just stayed in nice, warm (though, admittedly humid) China/Korea... I cannot believe that humanity was able to live, and survive, for thousands of years up here in this barren, cold desert! It's an absolutely incredible feat, I must say.
It's also uncanny the resemblance between the Inuit and the Koreans (if I do say so myself... :P )... some of the elders have called me 'granddaughter' since I remind them so much of their own, which is kind of nice. On the other hand, if I really was once of their own, I probably would've had five or six children, two or three abortions and about ten bouts of STDs by now... I also went on a couple of home visits, and I could've sworn I was looking at my own grandmother in one of the houses (Gloria, it was uncanny)... I should've taken a picture...
At any rate, I am now capable of doing all this b/c I finally got my lent parka! Those things are amazing! I can't see or hear anything once I've got it on properly, so if someone's gonna run me down with an ATV, at least I'd be puffy, fluffy and warm doing it :) My first two days without it though, I must say were quite, uh, chilly, to say the least... so I'm quite thankful that it was finally found for me... which is also a good thing, not just for the warmth but for another (embarassing) reason, but that's for another time...
Thanks to those of you who've sent pictures, they are GREATLY appreciated! and I would always be glad for more!
Also, for those of you asking for a mailing address so you can mail me fun stuff (please don't send anything after mid-April, cause I may not get it in time), just send it to the hospital, addressed to me, Dr. Julia.
Baffin Regional Hospital
Box 1000
Stn 1036
Iqaluit, NU
X0A 0H0
Later!! Love you!
julia
It's also uncanny the resemblance between the Inuit and the Koreans (if I do say so myself... :P )... some of the elders have called me 'granddaughter' since I remind them so much of their own, which is kind of nice. On the other hand, if I really was once of their own, I probably would've had five or six children, two or three abortions and about ten bouts of STDs by now... I also went on a couple of home visits, and I could've sworn I was looking at my own grandmother in one of the houses (Gloria, it was uncanny)... I should've taken a picture...
At any rate, I am now capable of doing all this b/c I finally got my lent parka! Those things are amazing! I can't see or hear anything once I've got it on properly, so if someone's gonna run me down with an ATV, at least I'd be puffy, fluffy and warm doing it :) My first two days without it though, I must say were quite, uh, chilly, to say the least... so I'm quite thankful that it was finally found for me... which is also a good thing, not just for the warmth but for another (embarassing) reason, but that's for another time...
Thanks to those of you who've sent pictures, they are GREATLY appreciated! and I would always be glad for more!
Also, for those of you asking for a mailing address so you can mail me fun stuff (please don't send anything after mid-April, cause I may not get it in time), just send it to the hospital, addressed to me, Dr. Julia.
Baffin Regional Hospital
Box 1000
Stn 1036
Iqaluit, NU
X0A 0H0
Later!! Love you!
julia
Tuesday, March 09, 2004
Nunavut I
Welcome to yet another bunch of Postcards from the Edge. To those of you new to the series, every time Julia goes on a little adventure, I send out mass e-postcards just letting ppl know how things are going...
Someone correct me here, but I think I'm on Part XIII, but I'm totally not sure... does anyone know what Benin was?? XII? XI?
At any rate, for those of you who remember my first reaction when I stepped off the plane in Niger... this was totally the opposite reaction... when we landed, the snow was blowing all over the place, but I ASSUMED it was b/c the plan was landing and making lots of air and blowing the snow all over the place... well, stepping out of the plane, I nearly got blown off the staircase b/c of the wind!!! :) So I crouched down real low and crawled down the stairs and then semi-ran to the terminal... although, it's cold!!!! Despite my valiant efforts of dressing warmly, I walked about half a block and then couldn't feel my nose...
Admittedly, I didn't land until 7pm (yes Hary, 7pm!!! Twelve hours after you dropped me off!!!!).... I'm not quite sure what happened, but this confirms my adage of: Never get to the airport more than an hour before a domestic flight. For some reason, my flight was delayed by about four hours, and then, instead of directly flying to Iqaluit, we went through Montreal (?!?!) and Kuujjuaq before finally heading to Iqaluit... the sad thing is, (which is what I was thinking as I was being blown off the stairs) I realized I could've been in Paris in the time that I was on a Canadian plane... or at least to Vancouver and back.... and it would be a good 20 or 30 degrees warmer...
On the plus side, watching the sunset from the airplane was gor-ge-ous! It was all blue and green and red and yellow and purple-y and all rainbow-y and beautiful... however, b/c of my point and click, and the airplane windows were dirty, I didn't take a pic.
Which brings me to another point (boy, I'm being particularly wordy!!!): I would really love having some photos of ppl up here with me... if anyone's got some handy dig photos and wants to forward them to me, so at least I can have a photo album on my computer up here, I'd appreciate it :)
That's all for now!!! Love you all!!!
julia
Someone correct me here, but I think I'm on Part XIII, but I'm totally not sure... does anyone know what Benin was?? XII? XI?
At any rate, for those of you who remember my first reaction when I stepped off the plane in Niger... this was totally the opposite reaction... when we landed, the snow was blowing all over the place, but I ASSUMED it was b/c the plan was landing and making lots of air and blowing the snow all over the place... well, stepping out of the plane, I nearly got blown off the staircase b/c of the wind!!! :) So I crouched down real low and crawled down the stairs and then semi-ran to the terminal... although, it's cold!!!! Despite my valiant efforts of dressing warmly, I walked about half a block and then couldn't feel my nose...
Admittedly, I didn't land until 7pm (yes Hary, 7pm!!! Twelve hours after you dropped me off!!!!).... I'm not quite sure what happened, but this confirms my adage of: Never get to the airport more than an hour before a domestic flight. For some reason, my flight was delayed by about four hours, and then, instead of directly flying to Iqaluit, we went through Montreal (?!?!) and Kuujjuaq before finally heading to Iqaluit... the sad thing is, (which is what I was thinking as I was being blown off the stairs) I realized I could've been in Paris in the time that I was on a Canadian plane... or at least to Vancouver and back.... and it would be a good 20 or 30 degrees warmer...
On the plus side, watching the sunset from the airplane was gor-ge-ous! It was all blue and green and red and yellow and purple-y and all rainbow-y and beautiful... however, b/c of my point and click, and the airplane windows were dirty, I didn't take a pic.
Which brings me to another point (boy, I'm being particularly wordy!!!): I would really love having some photos of ppl up here with me... if anyone's got some handy dig photos and wants to forward them to me, so at least I can have a photo album on my computer up here, I'd appreciate it :)
That's all for now!!! Love you all!!!
julia
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