rain, rain, rain

all this rain in sydney!! its so dark and gloomy....stuck indoors

reminds me of the time i got stuck in the chennai floods in 2005

i thought i was oncall for the whole weekend, but it turns out i'm only oncall for monday, and then next weekend...being called to the hospital is probably the only thing that would get out of the house in this sort of weather, but luckily that wont happen, at least on saturday and sunday.

its ironic that whilst its absolutely pouring down in sydney, and it reminds me of that delayed monsoon in 2005, chennai is currently experiencing 40-45 C temperatures and there's a massive water shortage. my relatives in chennai have running water for one hour (4-5am) every second day. in this time, they have to fill as many buckets and other receptacles as possible to last for the next 48 hours.

dont u hate it when people lament about the quality of manufactured goods "these days", and how "back in the old days they were built to last". well, i find it quite irritating, but i'm going to do it now....

my damn mobile phone decided suddenly to stop working today. actually the phone works fine but the screen has stopped working- there is a bunch of straight and curved lines of various colours and nothing else. and even more frustrating- the warranty expired about 2 months ago!!! when the warranty was extant, i dropped the phone numerous times on all sorts of surfaces- carpets, tiles, footpaths, grass etc etc, without any problems whatsoever. its almost as if the phone was designed to breakdown just after its warranty expired.

things just arent built to last these days

so, its june, nearly halfway thru the year and i'm nearly at the end of another term. rehab was fun, mainly because its laidback and very easy for me to get on top of things. the few times i've been busy are when patients get acutely sick (which is sort of good for me to handle, not so great for the patients) or when we have lots of discharges and new admissions (these always co-incide because the waiting list for rehab is always long). but i've had enough of old people with broken bones, and long detailed discharge summaries, and doing other doctors' work (as soon as a patient gets accepted for rehab, the acute services doctors neglect them and leave things undone coz hey, the rehab guys will have to do it), and being treated like a halfwit nobody by cardiology registrars. well that last thing wont change, but still, surgery ought to be much more fun than rehab. probably a higher volume of useless paperwork, but nonetheless there should be more action.

give johnny a (small) break

i was recently informed that i've been kicked out my parents' health insurance policy and hence would have to buy my own insurance. then i saw a govt ad about new laws which force all health insurance companies to provide information in a standard format thats available to browse on the federal govt website.

i was pleasantly surprised to find that all the information was there, and it made the whole process so much easier. its quite a pain to actually look up each company's website and trawl thru all the crap to find the useful info. but with this govt database, its really easy to narrow down what ur looking for and then u can go directly to the specific insurance company website and know what ur looking for to get the details.

whilst i still think that john howard is at least as morally corrupt as the average indian politician, i am very impressed with this measure as 1. all the basic info is in the one place and 2. u can compare prices against similar policies from different companies. it probably wont save johnny at the polls this year, but this is one thing that he actually does deserve a pat on the back for.

with the direction modern medicine is heading in, i dont think the medicare system can keep providing the level of cover it is currently providing. eventually, governments will cut funding into a health system which is potentially a black hole. private health insurance has to expand, i think, and play a more prominent role in the provision of health services, particularly hospital services, which are the most expensive.