Once upon a time I went to Markdale...

When I last posted on this blog in the dark ages, I promised another post detailing my trip to Markdale. My curriculum duties for the year concluded with this trip to small town Ontario to get a little taste of clinical medicine.

The experience was actually quite amazing, and writing from my vantage point of 6 weeks later, it seems that some of the original excitement might have worn off as I've spent a considerable amount of time doing other shadowing things at the Leamington hospital. (I suppose I should promise another post on my activities during that time...). I went up north with another of my classmates, Anita, and we were greeted early Monday morning with a tour, and the promise that we were essentially to have free reign over the hospital for the remainder of the week.

Markdale Hospital is small enough that we drove right by it when we arrived. It has something like 18 beds in it, an emergency department, an X-ray department, some day surgery and some physio. We spent the largest portion of our time in emerg, and I found myself amazingly intrigued by it. Basically, the week that I spent there showed me what family medicine might look like in a rural area. Which was the kind of thing I imagined I might be interested in in the first place. What I saw I kind of liked. You get a variety of things... traditional family practice, emerg shifts, anaesthesia, surgery... and I kind of liked the idea of a job that might look like that someday.

Pretty much every doctor I met in Markdale was a generalist, if not a family practitioner. I'm not naive enough to think that I'm not going to really enjoy other areas of medicine that I run into, but my experience so far has really confirmed what I was thinking I would like to do.

Now on to the fun part. The place I stayed when I was in Markdale.

We stayed with a (semi)retired anaesthetist who had built her dream home with her husband up in the forest in the area. This place was spectacular. I'm going to shut up and show you some pictures.
















We were greeted with this view.
















And then proceeded to their back porch, overlooking their private pond.
















Their beautiful pond...

















Not to mention the interior, which I can't do justice with in pictures, but this is their living room from the overlooking balcony





















And the little shack that they built on this land years ago, before they were retired and ready to build their mansion.

















And last but not least, my gracious, and amazingly hospitable hosts. I shot the best round of golf of my life (a 44... right on bogey golf) with Lorne one afternoon and Francis made us the best food all week long. Our classmates were so jealous...