Celebrity Spotting Up North

It was a bad start to my Friday when the coffee machine was empty of coffee beans at 8am – NOOO!! – but in the end it proved to be a very interesting day.

Friday is my trauma day and while we are relatively quiet in terms of trauma at the moment we ended up in an impromptu family meeting with one of our patients which was truly a ‘Territory experience’. This particular patient has been in hospital now for quite a while with a bad head injury. She is also one of the Tiwi Islands sister-girls. Sistergirls are also known as Yimpininni (Thanks Google!) and are men that identify as or live as women. They grow their hair long and aim to attract straight male husbands. They are a big part of the Tiwi community and an ABC documentary was shown a few years back about them which I will have to seek out sometime soon. Whilst the family meeting itself was nothing out of the ordinary, it was quite an interesting experience being in a room with a big traditional Tiwi family - an intoxicated father, the woman doing ‘woman business’ and a group of sister-girls wanting to be the middle of attention. Laura, my patient;s cousin, was a riot even demonstrating a few dance numbers for us in the middle of it all! It was all a bit too much for our young occupational therapist who grew up in rural NSW and has just come back from 2 years in London. She’s been in Darwin for 4 days and she needed quite a bit of debriefing afterwards. Poor girl!

My afternoon was management meetings with local CareFlight, St John and Army base personnel. It looks like we’ll be hosting nearly 250 US Marines as well as large numbers of Army guys in the centre over the next few months on various placements. Hello boys!

 My IT boys also pulled through and cheered me up with the first of my new large computer screens. I think they felt bad that I was a bit caffeine depleted.

 <-- Old screen

<-- New Screen

You cant tell very well from the pictures but my new screen is nearly twice the size of the old one. Its like sitting in the front tow of an IMAX movie! Wait til I get my second screen!

On my way home i stopped by the gym and was devastated to realise I had just missed "The Biggest Loser” TV crew. Selena from the white team is a member of my gym and the crew was here filming her. Talk about celebrity spotting! All I can say is that she must be at the beginning of her weight loss regime still cos she looks very similar to the Selena currently on our TV screens. Hopefully she’ll keep working, lose a heap of weight and become a massive celebrity so I can be her new BFF and go to all the celebrity parties with her. Totally good plan right?