Mutant Message Down Under (3 page)

I
T STARTED
in Kansas City. The memory of the exact morning is etched forever in my mind. The sun had decided to honor us with its presence after being undercover for several days. I had gone to the office early to plan for patients with special needs. The receptionist wouldn't be in for two hours, and I always treasured this quiet time of preparation.

As my key clicked in the outside door, I heard the phone ringing. Was there some emergency? Who would call this much ahead of office hours? I rushed to my inner office, grabbing the phone with one hand and flipping the light switch with the other.

A man's excited voice greeted me. He was an Australian whom I had met at a physician's conference in California. He was calling now from Australia.

“Ga-dye. How would you like to work in Australia for a few years?”

Speechless, I almost dropped the phone.

“Are you still there?” questioned the caller.

“Y-y-yes,” I managed to stammer. “Tell me what you have in mind.”

“I was so impressed with your unique patient-education program for preventive health that I told my mates here about you. They asked me to call. We want you to try and obtain a five-year visa and come here. You could write training material and teach in our socialized healthcare syt would be wonderful if we could get it implemented, and anyway, it would give you an opportunity to live in a foreign country for a few years.”

The suggestion of leaving my contemporary lake-property home, a securely established health practice, and patients who had become close friends over the years was a thrust into my comfort zone as foreign as the nail must feel entering the plank. It was true I was very curious about socialized medicine, in which you eliminate profit from the health-care system, where disciplines work together without the Grand Canyon between medicine and natural practitioners. Would I find peers truly dedicated to health and healing, to doing whatever works, or would I find myself involved in merely a new form of negative manipulation, like the politics of treating disease has become in the United States?

What excited me most was simply Australia. As far back into childhood as I could remember I had been drawn to read every book I could find about the land Down Under. Unfortunately there were few. At the zoo I was always seeking out the kangaroo, and searching for the rare chance I might see a koala. On some mysteriously hidden level, it was a quest I had always dreamed to answer. I felt I was a confident, educated female, self-supporting, and for as long as I could remember there had been a yearning in my soul, a tug at my heart, to visit the land on the bottom of the globe.

“Think about it,” urged the Australian voice. “I'll ring you back in a fortnight.”

Talk about timing. Only two weeks before, my daughter and her fiance had set a wedding date. That meant that for the first time in my adult life I was free to live any place on earth I chose and to do anything I truly desired. Both my son and daughter would be fully supportive as usual. They had, after the divorce, become more like two close friends than my children. Now they were both young adults on their own, and I was experiencing a wish becoming reality.

Six weeks later, the wedding celebrated and my health practice in new hands, my daughter and a dear friend stood with me at the airport. It was a strange feeling. For the first time in years I had no car, no home, no keys; even my luggage had combination locks. I had disposed of all my worldly possessions except for a few things in storage. The family heirlooms were safely placed in the care of my sister, Patci. My friend Jana handed me a book, and we hugged. My daughter, Carri, took one last photo, and I walked down the red-carpet ramp toward an experience on the continent Down Under. I did not anticipate the magnitude of the lessons in store. My mother used to tell me, “Choose wisely, for what you ask may very well be what you receive.” Although she had passed away years before, that very day marked the true beginning of my understanding of her oft-repeated phrase.

The flight to Australia from the Midwest is an extremely long one. Fortunately for travelers, even the big jets require fuel stops occasionally, so we were allowed to breathe fresh air as we took on supplies in Hawaii and again in Fiji. The Qantas jet was spacious. The movies were current top-rated American cinema. Still, the trip felt extended.

Australia is seventeen hours ahead of the United States. It is literally flying into tomorrow. During the trip, I reminded myself that we knew for certain that tomorrow the world would still be intact and functioning! It was already tomorrow on the land mass ahead. No wonder sailors of old celebrated robustly when they crossed the equator and the imaginary line on the sea where time begins. The concept today is still a mind-expanding one.

When we reached the Australian soil, the entire plane and all passengers were sprayed for possible contaminants to this isolated continent. The travel agent had not prepared me for this. As the plane landed, we were told to remain seated. Two ground-crew employees walked from the cockpit to the tail of the craft using aerosol cans above our heads. I understood the Australian reasoning, but somehow the comparison of my body to a destructive insect was demoralizing.

Quite a welcome!

Outside the airport, the scene looked like home. In fact, I would have thought I was still in the United States except the traffic was zipping along in a direction opposite ours. The taxi driver was seated behind the steering column on the right. He suggested a foreign exchange booth where I purchased dollar bills too large to fit into my American wallet but much more colorful and decorative than our greenbacks, and I discovered wonderful two- and twenty-cent coins.

Over the next few days, I found getting accustomed to Australia no problem at all. All the major cities are on the coasts. Everyone is interested in the beach and water sports. The country has almost the same square miles as the United States and is similarly shaped, but the interior is isolated wasteland. I was familiar with our Painted Desert and Death Valley. However, the Aussies sometimes find it difficult to picture the heart of our country growing wheat and rows and rows of tall yellow corn. Their interior is so unsupportive to human life that the Royal Flying Doctor Service remains on constant call. The pilots are even sent on rescue missions with petrol or automobile parts for stranded motorists. People are flown in airplanes to receive medical attention. There are no hospitals for hundreds of miles. Even the school system has education by radio available for the youngsters in the remote regions.

I found the cities very modern, with Hilton, Holiday Inn, and Ramada hotels, shopping malls, designer clothing, and rapid transit. The food was different. In my opinion, they are still learning to make some basic imitations of American favorites but I found wonderful shepherd's pie like I had in England. They rarely served water with meals and never with ice cubes.

I love the people and their different expressions:

It seemed odd in the stores that they said thank you before they said please. “That will be one dollar, thank you,” the clerk remarks.

Beer is a great national treasure. Personally, I have never cared for beer, so I didn't try the variety of which they are so proud. Each of the Australian states has a brewery, and people are very sensitive in their loyalty, for example, to Foster's Lager or Four X.

The Australians have specific words they use for different nationalities. They often refer to Americans as Yanks, to a New Zealand citizen as a Kiwi, and to the British as Bloody Poms. One authority told me that “pom” referred to the red plumage worn by the European military, but someone else said it originated from the initials POM appearing on the clothing of the nineteenth-century convict arrivals; POM meant Prisoner of His Majesty.

Of all the things I love about Australians, I love the singsong tempo of their speech most. Of course, they told me I was the one with an accent. I found the Australians to be very friendly, making strangers feel at home and immediately welcome.

The first few days I tried out several hotels. Each time I checked in, they handed me a small metal pitcher of milk. I observed each guest receiving one. In the room I found an electric teapot, tea bags, and sugar. It seems the Aussies love tea with milk and sugar. It did not take me long to discover that a cup of American-tasting coffee was not obtainable.

The first time I tried a motel, the elderly owner asked if I wanted to order breakfast and showed me a handwritten menu. I did, so he then asked what time I wanted it prepared. He advised me it would be brought to my room. The next morning as I was taking a bath, I heard footsteps approach my door but not enter. I waited for a knock but none came. I did hear a strange noise like a slamming door. As I was drying myself, I began to smell food. I looked all around; there wasn't any. But I definitely smelled food. It must be coming from next door, I reasoned.

I spent about an hour preparing for the day and repacking my suitcase. As I was loading my suitcase into the rental car, a young man came up the sidewalk.

“Ga-dye, was your meal all right?” he asked.

I smiled. “There must have been some mixup. I didn't receive any breakfast.”

“Oh, yes, it is right here. I delivered it myself,” he said, as he walked over to a knob on the outer wall of the motel room and lifted it. Inside a little compartment was a beautifully garnished platter of rubbery cold scrambled eggs. He then walked inside the room and opened a cupboard door to display the dismal sight again. We both laughed. I could smell it; I just couldn't find it. It was the beginning of many surprises Australia held for me.

The Aussies were kind. I found them gracious when helping me locate a house to rent. It was in a well-kept suburban area. All of the homes in the neighborhood were built about the same time—all one-story, white, with front and side porches. None had locks on the doors originally. The bathroom facilities were divided, with the toilet in a little closet and the bathtub and wash basin in a separate room. I also had no built-in closet space but was provided with old-fashioned freestanding wardrobes. None of my U.S. appliances would work. The electricity is different, and the plugs are shaped differently. I had to purchase a new hair dryer and curling iron.

The backyard was filled with exotic flowers and trees. Because of the warm weather, they bloom all year. At night, cane toads came to enjoy the foliage perfume, and they seemed to increase in number over the months—they are a national nuisance, their population completely out of control, and so must be stabbed and controlled at a neighborhood level. My yard was apparently a safe haven.

The Australians introduced me to lawn bowling, an outdoor sport where all players wear white. I had passed stores selling nothing but white shirts, white pants and skirts, white shoes and socks, even white hats. It was nice at last to find an answer for such strange and limited merchandise. They also took me to an Australian Rules football game. It was really rough. All the football players I had ever seen wore heavy padding, helmets, and were fully covered. These fellows wore short pants, short-sleeved shirts, and no pads. On the beach I saw people wearing rubber hats that tied under their chins. I learned this indicated the person was a lifesaver. They also have special shark-patrol lifesavers. Being eaten by a shark is not a common occurrence but is enough of a problem to warrant the special training.

Australia is the world's flattest and driest continent. The mountains adjacent to the coasts cause most rainfall to run toward the sea and leave 90 percent of the land semiarid. You can travel by air two thousand miles from Sydney to Perth and see no towns.

I traveled to all the major cities of the continent because of the health project with which I was involved. In the United States, I had a special microscope that could be used with whole blood, not altered or separated. By viewing a drop of whole blood, it is possible to see many aspects of patients' chemistry graphically in movement. We connected the microscope to a video camera and monitor screen. Sitting next to the physician, patients could see their white cells, red cells, bacteria, or fat in the background. I would take samples, show the patients their blood, and then ask smokers, for instance, to step outside and have a cigarette. After only a few moments, we would draw another sample, and they could see what effects that one cigarette had. The system is used for patient education and is very powerful in motivating them toward becoming responsible for their own welfare. Physicians can use it for many conditions, such as showing patients the level of fat in their blood or a sluggish immune response, and then can talk to the patients about what they can do to help themselves. However, in the United States, our insurance companies won't cover costs for preventive measures, so patients have to pay out of pocket. We hoped the Australian system would be more receptive. My assignment involved demonstrating the technique, importing and securing equipment, writing instructions, and ultimately doing the training. It was a very worthwhile project, and I was having a wonderful time in the land Down Under.