Played a bit of Dragon Age which, it turns out, I really really like. I haven´’t really found anything to replace WoW, but this one is something I’d like to try. The problem is, it won’t run on my laptop – will have to buy a new desktop pc which I’ve planned on doing for a while anyway.

As always, I’ve been thinking about blogging but not actually doing it. As usual. So I’ve convinced myself that it doesn’t make much sense to force myself, I’ll just write when the mood strikes. There are so many things going on right now that I would really love to have some kind of record of later on.

Tired now – our train was delayed so we had to wait around for some time, and now we don’t exactly know how to get to my place since we’re not going to make our connection train. Train people say maybe there’ll be a bus. *sigh*

Can’t wait to get back to the hotel and take a nap.

Thing the first – I’m at a lecture course in Malmö and it turns put that playing Farm Frenzy during booooring lectures drains my ihone something awful. Möh.

Thing the second – I myself don’t have any experience with addiction. I have little effect of alcohol, which is a risk factor, but it just makes me wonder why in the world I should keep drinking if I feel more like coke. I am howerver starting to have a problem with painkillers. At the start I only took them against migraines (meaning max once a month). Then I started taking them for normal headaches. Then I don’t really know what happened, but I sometimes tool them if it felt like I was getting a headache.

I kinda outsneak myself by taking them in the middle of thongs, so that at the end of the day, I don’t even remember if I had two or four.

I’ve been making up excuses since I never even take the daily max dosage, and I’m not influenced in any weird way by them – but every time I go away for a week or so,I get a bit panicky, counting in my head how many pills I have left to take with me. Which is SO not a good thing.

So now I decided to wake up a d smell the coffee. Made a schedule so I will take the s regularly instead of sneaking them by me. I will reduce with one a week, so after four weeks, they’ll be gone. I will just have to find something else that feels nice – doesn’t feel very likely at the moment, but then I have to live with the not-niceness.

It all seems very real, to take them like this. Would rather just stop, but I’m already in this circle where I get a headache from the meds and then have to take them for the headache – so I’d rather be careful and taper out.

Thing the Third – you know how you sometes meet the nicest people you just click with? I met this awesome nurse in the cafeteria at lunch right now. We had such a great conversation. Good luck with your hand, I hope we can meet again

I do love my new place though – it’s the first apartment I have where I chose the furniture and all, so it’s feels like all mine. *hugs apartment*

Been feeling majorly BLEH the last two weeks though – awfully tired, stresed out, sad and such. I’ve now started to think over my work schedule, and prioritised differently. Been sitting in front of my daylight lamp faithfully every morning, and since yesterday I’m actually feeling a lot better. I hope it stays that way.

Now I just have to go to bed earlier, but hey, when did that ever work out before? I’ve been getting ear acupuncture, which is awesome for insomnia, and it’s helped a lot. I’d really like to get rid of my sleeping pills.

Anyway, YAY WEEKEND! <333 I’ll be off soon to buy julmust and chocolate.

Yeah, that’s what I thought. Apparently, the hospital disagrees.

Anyway, people seem to think I’m strange with my iPhone. Hungarian macho-colleague asked if it was mine, and when I said yes, he was all “Really?!?” with the appropriate stunned expression. Because you know, I’m a GIRL. Working a mobile is apparently supposed to be beyond me. Maybe he thought that I was supposed to give it to him and ask him to pleeease show me how to use this impossibly advanced work of technoloy, if possible with big bambi-eyes and everything. Idiot.

Also people are telling me I’m always doing stuff with my phone when really, I just read a bit at breakfast and lunch. I’ve finished The Time Machine now and have started with Alice In Wonderland. Because I don’t only use my phone for texting and playing Glyph, hah! Or writing blog entries over my tuna baguette. *cough*

This weekend, Bouncy Haired Girl visited and we caught up on all the tv series we were watching, but sadly not on the new Torchwood. Mainly because it seems depressing. I’m not spoiled at all, but the general theme might be one of these things that really scare me. (I have issues with supernatural stuff like demonic possession since I read The Exorcist and Rosemary’s Baby when I was twelve. I think at that point my parents had given up at actually looking at the 46543 books I dragged home from the library every week. Anyway, it freaks me out when it’s done in a certain way. More than spiders (!!!)

I guess I have to stop hiding behind my baguette and go back to work.

I can stand people suffering, especially when they come to me for help. That’s what I do, and I have tools to help. My attending said to me in supervision a few weeks ago that it’s fun to do the supervision because I see my work as centred on the patient, as opposed to colleagues whose work is centred on the organisation of the hospital, on politics. As long as I can work with my patients, I can take a lot of organisational crap.

Now I’ve been doing my last rotation for about five weeks. Internal medicine, neurological unit. I’m supposed to learn more about the differential diagnoses between neurology and psychiatry, so I’m normally taking care of the half of the unit who’s not suffering from stroke.

Meaning a lot of, as Bouncy Haired Girl calls it, MultiGlyo-whatnot, aka glioblastoma multiforme (GBM), aka unoperable-6-months-to-live-braintumors. These things are so bloody malignant that at the point in time you find most of them, there’s not a lot of treatment left to do, and what there is is palliative.

It might have something to do with my new Chemo Angel assignment (an organisation you should check out if you don’t know it, it’s fantastic) which is a woman my age with GBM and a 12 weeks old baby.

It’s odd. I don’t have such huge problems with death normally, but somehow, things seem to have been adding up. I don’t know. Bouncy Haired Girl says I’ve seemed sad the last few days. I’m glad she’ll be here this weekend – there’ll be So You Think You Can Dance and Torchwood to watch which makes for a good weekend, naturally. Also, three weeks until vacation, yay!

For serious? In Sweden aka the north pole?

Please for someone to be sending a breeze or maybe shooting me in the head.

Sadly because my tickets were booked from work, I’m travelling second class. Normally I take first,  because I tend to book very early, and since internet is inclusive, it tends to be cheaper for me. I shall try to sneakily change the booking for the train home, if possible, but only if the fee isn’t too high.

Anyway! While researching yesterday how much internet-on-the-train would cost me, I couldn’t miss the giant proud advertisement in which the train company announced that, whoohoo! Their internet connections were now three times as fast!

And while I’m always impressed with how they just get internet on a really quite fast moving train, I have to say that if this is three times faster, it must have been static before. Honestly. I miss home already.

Why am I going to Stockholm, you ask? I managed to get a spot on a so-called SK-course. These courses are paid for by the government, and are offered in all medical specialties. They’re normally made for residents in order to get a deeper knowledge of certain parts of your specialty. They’re never sponsored by any kind of pharmaceutical company, which is what makes them different from most, if not all, other courses.

Normally there are always about 200 or 300 applications for 30 or so spots. Because of that, the shorter the remainder of your residency is, the better your chances to get a spot.

I’ll be finished after summer. That’s why I can now visit a course about psychiatric diagnostics. It’s just a bit silly, since that is a course that would be very valuable when you’ve just started out – now, naturally, I already know a lot about diagnostics. Of course not enough to not be able to learn things, which I love to do, but it is a flaw in the system that you can’t get a spot when you would really, really need one.

I’m glad I got this one though. I’ll be in Stockholm until next Friday, with about seven hours of lectures every day. Yay! It’s always awesome to meet other doctors and to be able to ball ideas and to see how things are done in other parts of the country.

When I was an intern in my last year of med school, I did my voluntary assignment, naturally, in psychiatry. I was placed on an open unit dealing with patients with affective disorders.

There was a resident there, a woman called A – maybe in her mid-thirties or early fourties. She was specialising in Childrens’ psychiatry, and as such had to work a year in adult psychiatry.

I disliked her from the start. She was distanced and gave me the feeling I was stupid when I asked questions. At that point I was still seeing a therapist (who is also a psychiatrist) weekly while recovering from a severe depression I got about a year before.

I had two patients of my own. I still remember them, even though I can’t remember their names. (I’m bad with names. It’s annoying.) One was a depressive patient who was scared of being at home and later on of riding the bus. The other woman had what we thought might be bipolar disease and came in with a depressive episode.

Since she was bipolar and I always had the feeling I had to know things instead of asking on rounds with the chief attending, I I thought I’d try to find out what to do when someone had a manic eopisode, in case one of the other doctors would ask. Doc A was sitting in the conference room, and I asked her.

Lil Doc Fae: I was wondering, how would you treat a manic patient?

Doc A: Why do you want to know?

Lil Doc Fae: I have this patient with bipolar disease and thought they might ask during rounds. I know what to do about depression, but I’ve never seen a manic patient before.

Doc A *points*: There’s a bookshelf over there. Read it up.

I was mortally embarrassed. I read it up.

I told my therapist the week after and she chuckled and said, “Honestly – she’s a childrens’ psychiatrist and won’t have seen much of bipolar disease or mania. Have you not had the thought yet that maybe she doesn’t know either?”

And I boggled. Honestly. The idea that someone could know as little or less than me had never crossed my mind. That’s how confident I was at that point, haha! And somehow, instinctively, I knew she had to be right.

I never talked to Doc A about it. I didn’t even think about it myself, at that point I just thought, oh! and that was about it.

What I will never forget though is how things changed from that point on. Because suddenly it was easy to work with her. We got along very well. We played to each other’s strengths, and at the end she was my favourite doc there.

And all of this because I thought differently. Because that was the only thing that had changed, the way I perceived her. My behaviour to her must have changed, and that made her change hers. I have no idea that I did anything differently, but I believe knowledge of any kind makes you behave differently automatically.

It taught me to a degree to question others’ motives, especially when I assign them negative ones. I think it also meant that I was born to love cognitive therapy

But, anyway. Another thing. I’ve always seen my mother as an incredibly disciplined and tidy person. She used to have everything tidied, and cleaned and whatnot. And I could never do it. Cue tons of teenager-mother-conflicts. I’ve always had problems keeping order, I’ve always had waaaay too much stuff, never been able to keep sensible routines. At the same time it’s always been a big thing for me. While I’ll never be a neatfreak, I don’t like it when it’s too cluttered. I somehow always cross the line between comfortable and cluttered without noticing. Honestly, it just happens!

I remember very well the only day I’ve been truly suicidal, about nine years ago now. I woke with the thought, “I will clean now. At least they won’t be able to say that the apartment was a mess.”

And I wondered what the hell was wrong with me when obviously my mother had it all down, and how could I not have learnt this from her?

When I was visiting last week I got my answer – she isn’t too good at it, either. She really hates it as much as I do. She could force herself when she was home with me and my brother, but now that she’s working part time again, stuff doesn’t get done the way it did before. She told me how she didn’t clean the bathroom because my brother was staying and would shower that day, so it wouldn’t pay off to clean the shower just before that – sheesh, I so recognise that line of reasoning.

It was good, to see that she isn’t perfect, so I’m not too imperfect either.