This blog business is hard to master when my learning curve isn't just flat, it's sloping downwards. So let's find out if I know how to insert pictures into a blog: YES! Here is a very old photo of the home I lived in from 1939 to 1951; I was 13 when we moved into this house and 24 when I left for England; my mother had moved to another suburb near the centre of Adelaide when I got back to Australia in 1954 so my family home was no more. The Norfolk Island pines behind the garage were full-grown, probably about 12 meters tall, beautiful symmetrical trees. We had a lawn tennis court and a large fruit and vegetable garden that I am nostalgic for all these years later.
After the second world war ended in August 1945, life began to lighten up, slowly at first with wartime petrol rationing and other restrictions for a while, but by about 1947-48 things were getting back to normal. I was at university, approaching the end of the medical course in 1948 and finally graduating after six years' hard grind, in November 1949. We got the tennis court in operation in the summer of 1946-47 and for the next 3 years we played tennis most weekends from just before Christmas, when the exams were safely behind us, until about May when autumn began to shade over into winter.
In those years I was about the age that my grandchildren are now. I don't remember feeling that I had the world at my feet and I didn't have any idea what was in my future: to some extent life as a student was programmed and I passively accepted what was doled out to me - lectures, clinical tutorials to learn how to find out what was wrong with people and how to treat it; then a series of hospital posts in a year-long rotating internship. Those posts spanned the age spectrum from infancy to old age, they included two months each in a very busy emergency department, general surgery, internal medicine, and a mish-mash of other mostly useful experiences, but leaving important gaps, for instance no obstetrics/gynecology, no mental disorders except the occasional wierdo who turned up in the emergency department. There's much more I could say about those youthful experiences and the hopes, dreams, apprehension, uncertainties of life then. But that's enough already for now. More later, maybe.
In those years I was about the age that my grandchildren are now. I don't remember feeling that I had the world at my feet and I didn't have any idea what was in my future: to some extent life as a student was programmed and I passively accepted what was doled out to me - lectures, clinical tutorials to learn how to find out what was wrong with people and how to treat it; then a series of hospital posts in a year-long rotating internship. Those posts spanned the age spectrum from infancy to old age, they included two months each in a very busy emergency department, general surgery, internal medicine, and a mish-mash of other mostly useful experiences, but leaving important gaps, for instance no obstetrics/gynecology, no mental disorders except the occasional wierdo who turned up in the emergency department. There's much more I could say about those youthful experiences and the hopes, dreams, apprehension, uncertainties of life then. But that's enough already for now. More later, maybe.
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