Some of you might now, that I’ve been working at Fremantle Hospital for nearly 10 weeks now. Now that I got the website up and running I’d like to write something about it. Doing that just came to my mind because I’m actually at work right now nothing to do for another 30minutes…

So, how did I get the job in the first place? Well, I’ve been added to tons of email lists at the physics department when I got to Perth and I get tons of job offer notifications that they collect. I received an email from Phil, who works at the hospital and uni as well, looking for physicists in particular. Apparently they were very desperate because when 3 of us got there to introduce themselves they only had one question: “When can you start?”. Nice! Since it is pretty well paid (around 20AU$ after tax) I didn’t have to think long. After filling out tons of paper (they’re just as bureaucratic as the germans) we took a five day crash course in nuclear medicine, which was pretty cool! WA is like the only place in the developed world where you don’t have to have a degree in this to qualify for the job. They thought that physicists should be good because they know how to use computers and what a radioactive isotopes is…. but, seriously, everybody could do this job. I’ts basically placing the patient under the camera and hitting the button.

Although nuclear medicine itself is very interesting and can help to diagnose many problems or even help treating them I cannot imagine doing this for a living. Using the scanners and computers becomes quite boring after a while and sometimes I’m more tired from sitting in the hospital for 7 hours than I would be from jumping and swimming all day, a whole new experience, I didn’t know one could feel that exhausted from sitting only! Besides that I prefer a job with less really sick people around. It’s really depressing to see how many people can not move themselves without 3 others helping them and all the young cancer patients are not really encouraging either.
It takes about 20 minutes to get here in the morning. Going to Freo (Fremantle) during low traffic times normally takes more around 10 minutes from where we live in Nedlands.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 1st, 2005 at 4:49 am and is filed under Australia. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.