Nunavut V

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