Two weeks
After months of anticipation, we are now two weeks from departure on the wildest adventure we have ever undertaken. We will fly from our home here in North Carolina to Seattle, where I grew up and we will visit with family and friends for the following two weeks. After that, we will spend 21 hours traveling to the other side of the earth to the city of Gisborne in New Zealand.
Gisborne is a city of about 37,000 in the Tairawhiti region of the North Island of Aotearoa (the Maori name for the land of New Zealand). Tairawhiti is the easternmost region of the mainland and known for Maori culture, magnificent surfing, and renowned wines. We are fortunate to have found a rental house just back from the curve of Wainui Beach on the outskirts of Gisborne. Our kids will be going to the local schools, one in primary school just down the street and the other in intermediate school a short bus ride away.
In May, I will join Hauora Tairawhiti (the district health board) as a doctor of General Medicine. Having grown increasingly disillusioned by my experience in the US medical system, I eagerly anticipate the opportunity to explore the Kiwi system. I still love the practice of medicine, but in the US we spend so little time on actual medicine. I typically spend more than half of my day on increasingly arcane documentation, coding, and billing requirements that have nothing to do with the well-being of patients. The increasing commercialization of US medicine has pushed physicians and patients from the center of medicine, leaving patients vulnerable and physicians infuriated or demoralized.
There is so much more to say on the failings of the US health care system--for example, my recent essay published by KevinMD--but for now I am focused on this journey of discovery that is about to begin. In the meantime, we are now squarely in that stage of preparation when it looks like our house has been hit by very organized robbers--missing wall art, whole shelves cleaned out above shelves still full of books and photos, and everywhere you look piles and stacks of boxes. We have spent the last 6 months of preparation focused mostly on completing the required red tape to get us into the the country (in the middle of a pandemic) and paring down the accumulated belongings of 14 years of marriage and 12 years of parenting, and now would be overwhelmed with both the excitement and trepidation of this new venture were we not so consumed with packing.
Though I have some qualms about blogging--a particularly self-promoting form of expression in our era of reverence for the individual--I hope that sharing some of our experiences here with you will invigorate our connections while we're apart and might even deepen our understanding of how to build a fulfilling practice in medicine and in life.
