Darren's been on call for the international arm of chopperdocs this week, and true to form, there was nothing to do while Ella and I were out at work/nursery and a job to French-speaking New Caledonia (Nouvelle Caledonie) the minute we were spending family time.
On paper, the chopperdoc job looks quite attractive and admittedly it's preferable to a 9-5 week job with weekends on call, but from a practical housewifey point of view it does make things difficult to plan, like defrosting two pieces of fish and having to shelve the idea because Batban's not here to eat his. That sort of thing.
The other thing is that the Sydney arm of the company is still evolving and their base at one of the hospitals out west is nowhere near the airport at Mascot, so when the bat phone goes off, he has to drive over to the west of the city to sort out the medical kit and pick up the drugs, then haul himself back over here to the airport to board the plane. It's not exactly what you'd call rapid response, especially not when the batphone rings during the peak rush hour.
Anyway, the patient was a fifteen year old boy french boy who needed transferring to Sydney because he had heart failure of unknown origin, which is very rare at that age but might indicate viral myocarditis (get me, Doctor Kildare).
The flight took three and a half hours and Darren was the only french-speaker on board. He reckons he was complimented on his french, which is surprising because his GCSE oral exam consisted of lots of questions on the part of the examiner and lots of facial expression on the part of the candidate, facial expressions littered with hand gestures and exclamations of "haw hee haw hee haw", a combination that worked well enough (or was funny enough) to get him an 'A' grade, though we all know the GCSE's not a patch in the 'O' level, however you look at it.
Patient Update
The very very senior politician made a good recovery and has left ICU.
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