I'm going to have to rename one of the cats Julia Gillard

My family has a lot of pets including an above average number of cats. With the "top cat" of the household approaching 12 years old, the younger cats have clearly decided that she's "passed it" and it must be time to establish a new leader. Currently the small female ginger cat is making her intentions known. Her first campaign move has been to constantly intimidate all opposing parties and the second has been to starting building an alliance with the dogs. If she doesn't calm down we'll start calling her Julia, as in Gillard.

This week has been a rather eventful one already. My sister spent Monday night in the local emergency department with a very painful infection. She was very unwell and it was a very distressing incident for all involved. Thankfully she has made a full recovery.

Yesterday I was lucky enough to contract a nasty stomach virus. It has been quite a while since I felt that unwell. I managed to drag myself off the couch and to the doctor where they whisked me onto the bed in the nurses room and gave me IM maxalon and some buscopan. The doctor and the nurse flirted with the idea of sending me to hospital to put in an IV to rehydrate me but thankfully once the drugs started to kick in I was able to keep some fluids down.

Just about every time Mum goes interstate one of us kids has some sort of weird and wonderful medical emergency. Given that Katie was in hospital on Monday night and Mum flew out on Tuesday morning, I was especially keen to do whatever I could to avoid a hospital admission. 

I have an assessment tomorrow that I have been panicking about for a few weeks now. It will be my first practical assessment for paramedic clinical concepts. We are being assessed on our knowledge and ability to operate two pieces of equipment; the oxysaver and the MRx monitor. The assessment looks quite straightforward, however, we were taught the skills in week 2 and until Tuesday had not had a chance to access the equipment again to practice. For a course based around practical skills, I found this to be quite inadequate.

In previous years, students were about to access the equipment to practice for assessments any time the paramedic building was open. Due to too many breakages and thefts, the uni has decided to discontinue unsupervised student practice opportunities all together. This seems an absurd response to me. I don't see why the uni couldn't set up an equipment borrowing/ equipment room booking system through the library. I know that other universities have this kind of system for courses like mine. It gives their students a chance to practice as well and the university can track down the culprit in the even of an unreported breakage or theft.

I have a medical certificate which has me covered for work and uni, Friday inclusive, but I think I will try and drag myself in for the assessment. Sometimes the only thing worse than having to do a test is to have to wait even longer for it to be over.

I saw something today which I found particularly compelling which was this collection of photographs. Craig F. Walker won the Pulitzer Prize for feature photography for this collection and I think he was a very worthy winner.