Adelaide At Last

It was comforting from the plane to see a remarkable difference as we descended into Adelaide. There were plenty of green hills and houses all had yards.  It wasn’t blatantly busy – you couldn’t see the crowds competing for sidewalk space.  It was a good sign.

I had never been met at the airport by someone holding a sign bearing my name, so I felt a bit important to walk up the ramp and see “Chad & Melissa: Radiology” on an 8 x 11 card.   It was nice to finally meet someone from the hospital we would be working at for the next year. Up to this point, it has only been emails with the Head of Medical Imaging. He had been so kind as to arrange for Liza, the Chief of Radiology, to pick us up and haul us back to the city, and to our hostel.

She gave us a few points about the city, mainly that it was not nearly as big as Melbourne, was more spread out over a wider area, and was actually considered as the “hillbilly” city of Australia.  Music to our ears!!  The “city” center, was in fact, only 1 square mile wide and surrounded entirely by parks on the outskirts. The rest of “Adelaide” was spread out over the hills and along the coast.

Then Liza quizzed us about our program, and what we had done in hospitals so far.  OIT’s program is so unique, that most hospitals that are unfamiliar with the University don’t quite understand that coming into this, we have absolutely no real clinical experience.  Trying to explain this to our future supervisor made us feel incredibly dumb.

Most Univerisites have their students rotating through the hospital in synch with their classroom coursework over a 4 year period, whereas with OIT, we do all of our classroom coursework first, then spend our final year just concentrating on clinical work (hence, our purpose for being here in Adelaide at all!)  But, explaining this to a supervisor who has never dealt with American students, let alone ones from a program like ours, is one of the most humiliating things I’ve experienced here so far. “Well, we haven’t actually done any exams on actual patients” “Well, we haven’t worked in any other modalities, only rotated through” “Well, we haven’t done any of that before” “No, we’ve never performed that, either”.  I felt like we were broken down to basically sounding like we knew nothing.

We were let off at 109 Carrington, in front of our hostel – our new temporary home for god knows how long – and thankfully it was superbly impressive compared to our Melbourne dwelling.  We had an enormous bed to spread out of, and as Chad gleefully cried out as we opened the door “we have TV!”, with even our own little fridge.  I was able to connect with my sister and both of my Mums via Skype for a few quick words, too, which was nice – all of them a bit giddy that they were talking to someone “on the other side of the world”.  But then our focus quickly turned to that little voice of panic in our heads whispering “How much money do you have?  What are you going to do about accommodation?  WHERE ARE YOU GOING TO LIVE!?”