Not in NZ anymore Dr Ropata.

 I’ve stopped asking people if they want to take their placenta home.

Dragon boat racing is going well; I missed a couple of weeks, and they missed me too which was incredibly sweet. We do 200m and 600m sprints and I had fallen clearly behind in fitness; struggling to keep up with pace.

They’re doing proper coaching now and this week we got advised not to crunch over when we get tired at the end of the races. When we get fatigued, we apparently all curve over like prawns, which mean we make smaller paddle strokes; and our lungs don’t expand properly and we get more tired and inefficient. The advice was simple; head up, look up, watch the people around you and keep same pace as sometimes it has slowed. The boat will run smoother if you put the paddle in in sync with others, even if you can’t paddle as strongly.

I got angry in theatre at student midwife that was recording a Caesarian section from start (not just when the baby was coming out). It wasn’t good.

Any story that starts with “I got angry in theatre…” is going to be at best laced with disappointment, and worst, be a dangerous story. This was, thankfully, a safe but disgruntled story. I was a bit sleep deprived. The day was clunky and slow and we weren’t getting through the operations that we needed to do in any good pace. I was tired, and annoyed that permission for filming hadn’t been clarified. It was, apparently, something the patient had wanted. But they hadn’t asked. And back home, it would be an absolute hard no: no filming in theatre, no staff faces in still photos.

But it’s pretty common and accepted here.

And apparently people do want to see their own surgeries. Which I think is a bit, well, potentially traumatic? And weird?

I don’t think taking a placenta home is weird but most people here do.

Filming is a minor cultural difference and I shouldn’t have gotten hung up on it. But when I’m tired and curled over, looking down, and getting cranky; I gotta remember: head up, look up, watch the people around you and keep same pace as sometimes it has slowed. The boat will run smoother if you put the paddle in in sync with others, even if you can’t paddle as strongly.