RGPWA Trainee Tales: Dr Rory van der Linden

"It’s day one of the 2023 Surfing Doctors Conference, and whilst the jungle that meets the world-famous wave – G-Land – still sleeps, the surfing doctors are hyped and ready to go. For the next five days, the waves and the Jawa Jiwa surf camp in East Java, Indonesia, will be filled by a group of 25 doctors, some with their families, who surf to work and work to surf. Yes, this is a group of people, so hell bent on surfing and medicine, that they have come to the far reaches of the east Javan jungle for the yearly Surfing Doctors Conference.

After our first surf, we were welcomed by Dr Phil Chapman, who dived into the story of the Surfing Doctors inauguration which involved some extremely consequential waves, a frustrated and somewhat inexperienced surfer, an open-book-pelvic fracture, and Phil being called to urgently attend the beach. 36 hours and many vials of ketamine later; with a makeshift ambulance, a 10-hour drive, 30-minute boat trip and many local police pay-offs, Phil managed to transfer this guy for international medi-vac from Bali.

Having set the tone for an exciting conference, each attendee introduced themselves, revealing a cohort of diverse medical and surfing backgrounds, hailing from Australia to as far as Belgium and the Canary Islands. Naturally surfing was a shared priority, so with our forecasting technologies at hand, the final welcome job was to appropriately plan the conference sessions to account for our needs and desires which included surfing, yoga, and making new friends.

Of course, there were particular educational highlights of the conference. These included consultant-led sessions on resuscitation in the jungle; ultrasonography workshops with basic echo skills and optimisation of subxiphoid views; procedural sedation; post cardiac arrest management; and MSK injuries and how management differs in the jungle.

A number of juniors presented and ignited round table discussions on the topics of tropical soft tissue infections, ocean animal toxicology, multi-trauma, and surfing related eye injuries.

Perhaps the most enjoyable sessions of the conference were the practical workshops which required a combination of teamwork, medical experience, wilderness resourcefulness, and a splash of artistic license in order to extradite patients from the reef, stop exsanguinating bleeding, and immobilise long bone or spinal fractures in a surfing related trauma.

On the final days of the conference, we were blessed with the best waves of the trip; a few barrels were scored and many were recounted as we reminisced on what had been another great Surfing Doctors conference in G-Land.

As we watched our final sunset in G-Land for 2023, some 16 years since that harrowing accident, it became apparent that the combination of surfing and medicine seems so very natural when you appreciate the character of the individuals striving to achieve the ever sparkling, but unattainable, mastery of each field.

Among the Surfing Doctors, there is passion, determination, resourcefulness, and an extreme sense of collegiality. Accordingly, we look forward to our conferences, and extend the invite to anyone – surfer or not – who would like to join us in 2024.

Head to the Surfing Doctors website for more information on who we are and what we do."