Remember when you were a teenager, and you had a great experience at summer camp? At the end, on the last day, we kids would say goodbye, and tell each other "Have a nice life"; implying we knew we would never see each other again.
Tomorrow is my last day at the Winton Medical Centre, and it feels like the end of camp to me.
Way back when at the beginning of this blog I shared my goals and objectives for this experience, and I typed a lot of words about how I would behave and how I expected to respond. I set up rules for myself and imagined what it would be like, obsessed about how I would perform, visualized problems I would face, etc... Judging from some of the emails I'm now answering from other docs considering an international locum's job, I think this may be a common expression of performance anxiety. Despite trying not to expect anything, its only human nature to have a lot of expectations.
Yet I never imagined what would really happen to me here. I've fallen in love with this country, this community and the people here. Its a heady feeling, and I'm a bit distrustful of it- just as, so long ago, we never trusted our feelings about the romances we had at summer camp.
Maybe things feel so great just because they are so new, and so different from what we've known before. Or maybe its just endorphins from finally getting enough sleep, having only 6 night calls in so many months. Maybe its being free from the constraints of usual customs. Or the feeling of freedom from lack of being supervised, and being freed of our daily chores.
But its definitely very emotional, and I know I will miss everything so terribly much. (I could write a list of things I'll miss, but it would be humungous. And, like a lovestruck girl's gushing praises of her new fiance, the things one loves (e.g. apricot ice cream) are so personal that they ultimately bore others.)

Suffice it to say, that at the end of the day, what I will miss most is not the tui birds, or the mountains on my morning walks, but the people I've met here; my caring coworkers, the welcoming townspeople, and the lovely patients. This has been a very special time in my life. Like those golden days of summer camp, I know in my heart that it has been a once in a lifetime experience, one I will never forget. To the people of Winton, and especially the Medical Centre, thank you for everything. Here is a little slideshow, an Internet valediction.

This is my last week in Winton, and I'd rather blog than pack.










I have been savoring my last weeks of work here by walking along the edge of town in the mornings, watching the sunrise over the Takitimu. The sun came up this morning at 0845 AM, very late, as we approch midwinter at the end of the week.
The medical centre had a "midwinter dinner" hosted by the local hospital board on Friday, at Red's in downtown Winton. It was very nice, an opportunity to sit and visit with my coworkers outside of the office. Liz came with me and we ate a huge dinner. The staff presented me a great picture book about Southland. Most of the coffee table books you see of New Zealand try to capture the stunning monumental scenery in large pictures, and there are certainly some of those in this book. But I especially cherish it for the everyday scenes it contains: pictures of the local people, cows in pastures, hills and bridges, sheep of various types, shearing, etc. It is very unusual for the great job it does of capturing this region's special character and charm.
Saturday morning I ran "down to town" (Invercargill), did some quick shopping, stopped to say bye to the keas and kakas in the Queens' Park aviary, then came back home. Liz and I hung out in Winton in the afternoon, and I took a nice walk around the outskirts of town, on a blue-sky day that was absolutely still, no wind. The winter weather pattern here is 3 days of rainy weather followed by a day or two (3 if lucky) of quiet sunny cool weather.
Since yesterday was the rare third day, at least in the morning, I went fishing out on the Foveaux strait with friends. This was near Centre Island, in the ocean, about 1/3 of the way to Stewart Island.
It was just stunningly beautiful; a bit cold and windy, but with sun breaks. The mountains were all snowscapped in the distance, you could see the Takitimu mountians from the ocean, and the HumpRidge and Fiordland beyond shining in the sun under tatters of ragged clouds overhead. At one point we had a dozen mollymawks swimming off the back of the boat. We filled a large chillybin 3/4 of the way full with blue cod- they were biting like crazy. At one point I climbed up on the bow to pull the anchor, and I just sat there and looked around for 10 minutes, it was so beautiful and wild and untamed. It took my breath away.