AMSA Convention Melbourne 08

So, for those of you who don't know, I signed up for the Australian Med Students Association's annual convention. This year I headed to Melb on my bday for an event I didn't really know to much about - other than ifyou get a spot (rego fills up fast), you must go! Rego is short for registration, Aussies shorten any word they possibly can. They can even make up new short forms on the go and the rest of the people listening don't miss a beat, yet I'm baffled. So the convention combines both academic and social components and is a massive task to organize. It's the largest med students conference in the southern hemisphere. The one week has a million dollar budget, fully supported by the AMA, the Gov, etc. They brought in a ton of very cool speakers. For example, it was kicked off by the governor of Victoria - a former doc himself. He gave a welcome and motivational speech. Other speakers gave talks on patient centered approaches to weight loss, preimplantation genetics, leading techniques in medical imaging, wound management, HIV/AIDS, euthanasia debate anda bunch of others. I'm going to describe a few of my favs. Not those but they were also good. All the things you learned were not essential to passing the medicine course but fascinating to learn about.

Obviously I was going to like this one: They had a six person panel consisting of a current top Aussie rules football player, former olympic gold medalist in swimming and former aussie cricketer, two sports med docs and one surgeon. Basically they talked about medicine in sports from both sides. What athletes will do to play, what docs will or won't hlep them with, etc. Interesting debate/discussion. They also talked about how sports med has changed through the ages.

Tim Costello, the head of world vision australia talked about global poverty and how changing the poorest nations health and health infrastructure is the most effective way to bring them out of poverty.

Vinay Kumar flew in from the USA for free. (Apparently a lot of them volunteered their services but he had quite the distance to cover!) You won't know who he is, not even mom did, until I mentioned that he is the chief editor of Robbins' Pathological Basis of Disease. Aka a text book used by 95% of med schools around the world for around 50 years! He is this 70-something year old Indian, who worked with Robbins himself, and is basically considered the king of pathology. People actually brought their textbooks and lined up to have him sign it! He spent most of his free time with the UQ delegation (that's my school!) hanging out and even having some drinks! Hilarious man.

Jeff Kennett is a former politician who retired after someone in his family took her life from depression, to chair a national depression initiative entitled "Beyond Blue". He gave a passionate speech on the importance of basically having a life outside medicine. Having hobbies, having time to do nothing and relax, and having a support group (and GP) for yourself, both as a med student and doctor. Just a great speaker and he gave a great talk. It coincided nicely with the fact that AMSA launched a "Get a GP" campaign a few days before.

And lastly, my favourite talk was by Jeff Rosenfeld. He is a neuro surgeon and prof in Melbourne. He talked about a technique he pioneered and then helped teach other neuro surgeons how to do it. But it got really interesting when he started talking about how he likes to give his time to those less fortunate. He does teaching stints at the one med school in Papua New Guinea teaching surgery and neurosurgery. He works as a surgeon for the Aus Defence Force and that has brought him to Rwanda, East Timor, Solomon Islands, Bougainville and Iraq. He showed amazing pictures about how quickly the defence can get in and set up a field hospital in remote areas during times of crisis. Places like Iraq and Rwanda were during the wars, but he went to the island nations after natural disasters such as tsunamis hit. Basically the army can set up a fully functioniong hospital and these surgeons go nonstop. Amazingly powerful speech!


So it was great to hear all these talks and obviously - as med students are renowned for doing - we managed to squeeze in some fun in between!

You are now entering crocodile country

It took over a week but we finally made it to Cairns. We decided to have a relaxing day before our trip to the reef. We decided to stay at a hostel to get some laundry done, have some showers and hang out by the pool. We also had to go out and hire an underwater digital camera - which is the source of our numerous beautiful photos. At 7am the next day we made it to the harbour to meet the captain and crew of our boat. Our captain was a former phys ed teacher, who retired to run a volunteer organization for a few years, all while sailing recreationally. He then decided about a year and a half ago to buy a boat, and run a diving and sailing company. He was an amazing and friendly captain! The crew consisted of a cook and a diving instructor, who both helped out with the boat. It took us about three ours to get to the reef. It was high tide and got a little rough for a while. A few people were getting a bit woozy. Then we finally got there! Our own spot on the reef. Not a boat in site and we took up all 10 spots on the luxury yacht. We started off with a little bit of snorkelling before lunch and then went for our first dives. We had to learn a couple skills before heading in and then do them again at the surface before descending. Without a diving license we were allowed to go to a depth of 12 meters - so the plan is to hover around 10. At about 7 meters, my one ear wouldn't pop. It was a little frustrating not because of the pain but because I thought I wasn't going to be able to dive any deeper. All I had to do wasgo back up to 5 meters, than slowly go back down again. The first dive was quite the experience. 10 meters is really far underwater! However, I definately felt a lot more relaxed on the second dive. I was less concerned with my gear and my ear and just swam and embraced the ocean. While snorkelling at this spot enjoying the unbelievable reef life, I saw something big out of the corner of my eye. I look over and saw a 6 or 7 foot White Tipped Reef shark!!! Looks like a miniature Great white.......quite scary at first! But I figured, the odds are slim of seeing this thing so I can't let it go. I only managed to call over one other person - to enjoy (and verify) my sighting. We followed it as best we could. It only eats little guys and didn't mind us cruising up to about 5-10 feet from it. After we had all been amazed with the first site, we pulled up the anchor and moved down to another site. We had a chance to do a quick snorkel and some people dived in what would be our overnight location. We weaved into a location that had us surrounded by reef on all locations and hence had the name "360". The reef protected us well overnight so the waves weren't too much of a bother. We had a great dinner - all the food was freshly cooked and delicious. We played some games and hung out on the deck before calling it a night quite early. I really wanted to see the sun rise and woke at 6am.....10 minutes too late! Nevertheless, it still looked stunning. Somehow I managed to be up before everyone except the cook. I was done breakky and back in the water by 730-8am. The reef at 360 was quite built up, but as it builds it gets too heavy for it self. Certain portions collapse in on itself and create amazing swimming lanes to flow through. It also had one area known as the "swimming pool". A massive circle of reef had caved in creating 10 meter walls on all sides (except a few channels to swim into the pool). I believe this is in one of the clips from the youtube video I posted yesterday. We then packed up early in the morning to head to one more site. After seeing how good 360 was compared to the first chunk of reef, we thought there was no way it could get any better. Turned out, they saved the best for last. The final spot was a chunk of reef - that if viewed from the air above - was heart shaped. It also had about 870000000000 fish of all colours. One of the most neat lookign fish was a "trumpet fish". (Sorry mom, I didn't have the camera with me at the time to grab a shot of it.) After a second wonderful day, we had to pack it in. We were lucky enough to see two turtles (I only got a glimpse from theboat, never in the water), a shark, a trumpet fish, and about 380 thousand different types of fish. On the way home the ocean decided to give us one more treat: a fleet of dolphins cruising beside our boat.


We then spent the night camping in a small town outside of Cairns, by a river called "Butcher's Creek". Felt like we were in a cheesy horror movie.......for the girls. Turns out it was only Justin scaring them. The next day we made it to the Undara Lava Tubes. 180000 years ago a massive volcano erupted spewing tons of lava. It burnt holes in the ground and made massive tubes which are still around today. Pretty cool sights to see. It was also nice to make a bit of a trip into the outback and away from the coast. When we left the Lava tubes we saw a sign that said "DONT MESS WITH THE ROAD TRAINS". Turns out its easier to attach 5 truck beds than to have 5 trucks..........these big beasts get up to 55meters long. Basically you move to the shoulder when they are coming the other way. You also try to ignore the dead kangaroos and odd cow that have been smashed every 50 feet.

Trip Notes

Somebody on the trip compiled a bunch of the videos people took. It's about 4 minutes and located here: http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=42NvB09noy0

So our trip started off, at around 330 am as we headed down an empty open highway towards Fraser Island. We boarded one of the first ferries over to the island. The island is part of Great Sandy National Park and is the largest sand island in the world and a world heritage site. It had some pretty amazing sights and beautiful beeches and rainforests. Travelling around Fraser is pretty hectic. The major "highway" on the island is the beach! You just cruise along the sand ...during low tide only. And avoid one section that doubles as a airstrip - we had no idea until the plane came! Since you're advised to not swim in the ocean there becauseof sharks, we went swimming in two of the inland freshwater lakes -Lake Wabby and Mackenzie. Wabby is the one that is beside a massive sand dune in my photos. Every year the wind moves the sand towards the lake and it loses about 1-3 meters inwards each year. It was a pretty relaxing way to kick off the trip.

Our next stop was in the town of Agnes Waters and 1770. They are two tiny towns side by side. It's a pure surfer/beach town. They didn't get electricity until 1984!!! Some guy named "Ron", used to ride to Bundaberg once a week to pick up fresh foods, such as milk. Anyways, we hired out some surf boards and hit the beach. At night we went to there one bar, and oddly they were hosting a ping pong tourny. We thought what could be more fun. Turns out we were the least skilled people in hte tourny. It was like the olympic pingpong trials were taking place in 1770. We were back out on the water early next morning to get some surf in before taking off down the highway again.

We made a one night stop in Airlie Beach. There wasn't too much going there unless you are doing boat trip out the reef or whitsunday islands. We did spend the afternoon and fired up the barbie before leaving. Public barbeques is a fantastic thing! You can find them in almost every park or public place that I've been to. After Airlie we didn't know where we were going to stop. Then we saw a random highway sign for a national parkwith camping sites. So we decided to stay. Turned out to be one fantastic choice! The swimming area was called "paradise waterhole" and it was an area of a small river that widened out and got really deep. We just hung out there. Played in the water chasing fish and turtles and as you saw in the pics, worked on our flips. This was just a great day as we were in the middle of nowhere enjoying untalked about Australian outdoors.

Our next stop brought us to Mission Beach. It gots it named because it was a small town with some other name until it got devasted by a hurricane about 80 years ago. At which point people rallied together to help rebuild it "mission" style but there was no religious involvement. And for some reason the name stuck. The campsite we stayed at was meters from the beach. And the beach was awesome. It was like 50 meters of sand deep that was just perfectly flat. We stayed there for a couple days, kept ourselves busy by playing beach cricket and cracking open fresh coconuts- which is not as quick or easy as we had hoped. But still fun and delicious!


Anyways its time for state of origin - a rugby league battle between queensland and new south wales to determine which is the superior state. Clearly there is no doubt...go QUEEENSLAND! Tomorrow or the next day, I'll follow up iwth the next part and detail our amazing trip to the reef.