Joni said to write a test post so here it is!
Let’s try inserting a random image. Hmmm…
Popularity: 86% [?]
Tags: Pesky Real Life, test
I’m high on painkillers, which is indefintely better than migraine and PMS. Anyway, the tornado ep of Desperate Housewives was on (don’t you dare spoil me, I have no clue who’s alive and dead yet!). I love Desperate Housewives, this season is great - I’m looking forward to watching it every week.
Today’s source of amusement:
Carlos, seeing Gaby is packing two giant suitcases, “I told you to pack only the neccessities!”
Gaby: ” These are neccesseties!”
Carlos *points*: “Is that a boa?”
Yes, I’m easily amused.
Popularity: 80% [?]
Tags: Pesky Real Life
Work today went like this.
Got an adorable older couple. Guy has heart problems. He’s also had pain in his calf and foot for a few days, so I can’t rule out thrombosis.
Normally, I would send him to radiology. If all’s good, they send him back to me. If something’s wrong, they send him to surgery.
Today, surgery’s on strike. They only take prio 1 patients (equalling Take care of me NOW or I die!) which adorable older guy clearly wasn’t.
That just meant they could have sent him back to me though even if there was anything on the x-rays. Problem was, it was past four and we close at five, so he wouldn’t have made it back. Normally in that case he would have been seen by the surgery doc on call, but alas, strike.
So I tell him I’d be right back after clearling the logistics and go to Boss Nurse, who knows just about everything.
Me: Blahblah guy leg radiology blahblah surgery blah what now?
She: Hmmmm. That’s a very good question.
Oh God.
She: I don’t have a clue. You should call radiology.
Okay.
Me: Hi, radiology nurse! Blahblah guy leg radiology blahblah surgery blah what now?
Radiology Nurse: Hmmmm. That’s a very good question.
…
Radiology Nurse: Wait a sec, I will go and ask someone.
*cue waiting on the phone for ten minutes, wondering if poor patient has fallen asleep in my office yet*
Radiology Nurse: Um, I really don’t have a clue. How about we do the exam first thing tomorrow morning, and surgery will be open then too!
I’m really glad I didn’t get any real emergencies today.
Popularity: 42% [?]
Tags: Doctor Stuff
So here’s that update I’ve been promising. Things at work have been somewhat more tense the last week. I think the reason is that all over the country, nurses are going on strike. Here in Tinytown things will start to get funny on Monday.
Nurses here study for four years. They’re generally very well educated and do an amazing job. They’re also mainly female, and have two employers to choose from - in other words, they’re screwed. I’m all for them getting more money.
The only “but” there is that I wish they wouldn’t have to strike for it. It should just be bloody obvious to people that you should pay them according to the quality of their work, which they’re not right now. So they’re striking.
The thing is of course, that without them, nothing works. So even though the doctors, secretaries, assistant nurses and so on are working, the units in which the nurses are striking are still closing down.
In our hospitals it’s basically surgery, medicine and the ER. Of course they’re always taking real emergencies (meaning, if you have a heart attack, no one will send you home, but if you come in with a sore throat you’re out of luck) and the hospitals here and in Slightly-Bigger-Town are working together, so that the ER is open in one of the two.
Since I’m working in GP right now, for me this means that lots of the patients who would have gone to the ER during the night or weekend (the sore throat variety) will now be calling us in the morning instead.
The nurses’ union has asked for neutrality from the doctors’ union which has been granted. Meaning, we are not supposed to do any additional work that would normally done by nurses, so as not to dilute the effects of the strike.
Our nurses in GP won’t strike, and we have received a note that while we are to be neutral, our employer has the right to revoke free days and to prolong working hours. Which they promptly did, and I don’t especially like having ten minute appointments - mostly because I think my patients don’t really like having those, there’s not too much time to get any kind of talk, trust or relationship going. And of course they’re saying, this is neutrality because you’re not doing the nurses’ work, you’re doing the work the doctors in the ER would normally do! Which to me doesn’t really fly, and I feel like a strike breaker.
It makes me feel uneasy. There’s nothing I can do about it, really, and I can see on the other hand how it’s better the patient get a short appointment than not getting any, but - well, it’s making me uneasy. I remember when I was five, six years old and my grandfather was the president of Germany’s textile union, and how I would walk with him on the May 1st demonstrations, being proud of my red carnation broche. I have been thinking a lot about him these last days. He was an interesting man, managing to combine his work with being a conservative Christian (and voting as one). It has always fascinated me, even though I see myself neither as socialistic or conservative.
All that’s just to say, hey, work’s been a bit strange.
Friday our Diabetes nurse (who is awesome by the way, and one of the prime examples why they should really get 15% more pay - she knows more about diabetes than any doctor I know) took my bloodpressure. And, yikes. My mom has high bloodpressure, and I know that she found out when she was my age. I have been taking it just to see because of that in the past, but then I remembered I hadn’t checked in a long time.
Anyway, she was alarmed enough to give me the 24 hours - erm, thingo? You know, you fix the cuff on your arm and have a cable around your shoulder, and a little box on a belt that you’re carrying for 24 hours. It checks every 30 minutes, and every hour at night.
Yes, that does mean I didn’t sleep tonight, because every hour the damn thing made BZZZZZZZZZZZZ and blew up until I thought my arm would fall off. ARGH.
And just in case I will deny it later, if I’m lying over 140/90 average, I shall do the exercise thing till the end of the year to see if it makes a difference. Because I would so love to not have meds for the rest of my life. At least not yet 
On the light side, I’ve been stitching and I’ve finished the Hinzeit Doctor block today, YAY! I’m so very proud of it. While I was working at it I had to keep thinking about how I’m so glad I made it through med school, and thankful that my parents put me through it. I’m happy that I have a job that lets me feel that I sometimes make a difference. It’s the best feeling I know. And while I know that there should be other things in my life that make me happier than my job - well, maybe sometime there will be, but right now I’m just glad I’ve got that. It’s a great thing to have. I feel like I’m doing a good thing, and like I’m doing something I’m good at.
Sentimental blah-blah aside, here you go:
This is it without all the charms attached, because they will be hiding a big part of the caducei:
And this is it with the charms:
And two close ups that show the charms better. They’re adorable, I will definitely do more Hinzeit designs in the future.
This design does mean a lot to me, and I definitely want to buy a frame for it. I don’t know if I should get the frame that’s meant for it and shown in the picture (see in the last post or on Webshots) because I used such different colours, and I would love to have something in another colour. Right now I don’t have the money anyway, but it’s definitely something I want to save for.
Popularity: 42% [?]
Tags: Doctor, Doctor Stuff, Finish, Hinzeit, Memories, Pesky Real Life, Stitching
… is what I have been up to. I will try to write a longer update tomorrow.
I ordered some patterns for my kitchen lately, after I decided to have a coffee-chocolate-theme. (What else! LOL) Then I saw that they had the Hinzeit Doctor-block for sale, and since I adore anything with charms and had been ogling it forever and ever, I ordered it too.
It arrived the other day and today I spent an embarrassingly long time matching fabric and flosses. I didn’t want to do it in the original colours because I find them kinda boring and much too un-purple.
I finally settled on a hand-dyed pink fabric from Polstitches. I will try to take a pic by daylight tomorrow, the colour is a good deal brighter than in this pic.
I will stitch it with Stef Francis Silk for the letters and outer border. It’s the first time I’m using silk and it is so wonderful to work with I never want to use anything else again.
The caducei are done in Carrie’s Creations Eggplant, and the inner border will be Carrie’s Creations Deep Purple.
You should see the charms, they’re so cute! I can’t wait to get this finished.
Popularity: 26% [?]
No, really, I’m still alive.
I hate it when the administrative stuff at work takes over patient work. I stayed more than an hour late today and am still not finished with the bloody paperwork.
I HATE PAPERWORK.
In case you hadn’t noticed.
Then I had to go shopping, but didn’t. Heh. And then I went home and got all my cables and stuff from the Home PC program together. It’s a thing where you get a pc from work and pay a little every month. After three years you can either pay it off and keep it or give it back. I decided to give mine back mostly because it went poof. Colourfu lines all across the screen, and it kept crashing. It’s a laptop and overheats every other minute even when it’s standing on the table.
So I kept all night deleting stuff from it - because, you know, official people from work. Eeeeeek 
Tomorrow I’m off work early to bring back the pc, which would be great if I hadn’t Wednesday and Thursday off - which is great don’t get me wrong - but it means that I have to somehow finishe all the BLOODY PAPERWORK before. Which seems just a tiny bit impossible right now.
I will have delicious cheese sandwiches now.
Popularity: 20% [?]
Tags: Doctor Stuff, Pesky Real Life
Bouncy Haired Girl was visiting this weekend, and guess what? I managed to get her kitted up for two little projects out of Cross Stitch Crazy and she started stitching! *insert evil laugh* Sooner or later I’m gonna get you.
I had a nice conversation with a colleague today. She’s German too, but I don’t know her apart from work. I like her, she has a dry humour that cracks me up.
I was walking home in the sunshine (it’s spring, finally, and I’m starting to believe the snow is done with till winter) with my ipod as usual, and met her. She was waiting for her husband who’s currently working in medicine. During my internship, I was truly miserable when I had to do medicine. It was the only clinic where I really felt the division of “you interns over there” and “us regular docs over here”. They had this thing going on where all attendings would go home early on Fridays, shortly after lunch.
Meaning there’s literally one attending who has their hands full with emergency patients, and a bunch of interns and residents, when they have any. All the people who actually know their stuff and have some experience go home.
Not to mention how much it sucks to be left there on a Friday afternoon with tons of work to do, knowing that if they’d stay, everyone could go home a bit early, but because they have to rush out after lunch, you’ll be there till seven. With no one to ask in case anything goes wrong, and things on ICU’s have a tendency to do just that.
It seriously sucks big time, to be sitting there thinking “PLEASE no one try to die now, because I don’t have much of a clue.” Not because the interns/residents are bad at their job, but because they’re supposed to have supervision and aren’t ready to handle all these cases.
Anyway, German Colleague will do her rotation there soon and asked me if it really was as awful as it sounded, and I kinda had to say, yeah, it was. She’s scared, which made me feel a bit weird - I still thought that I was only scared because I didn’t have a clue, but it seems I’m really not the only one.
When her husband was sitting there with work coming out of his ears, the attending bounced in and announced, “Anything more to do? I’m going golfing now!” I mean, come ooooon, how much more cliché can you get?
Anyway, long story short, it was good to see that it wasn’t just me who was scared of all that crap. I always thought of it as a personal weakness, and it was freeing to realise that it wasn’t, it’s really them who are nasty.
Also, German Colleague thinks I always seem calm and as though I have everything under control and know my stuff. Might be she’s certifiably insane and I have to take back everything I just said
Yes, I’ve been stitching, pics will come later this week.
Popularity: 23% [?]
Tags: Doctor Stuff, Pesky Real Life, Stitching
My mom is totally awesome. Just thought I’d say.
See, there’s this liqueur I really like, called Ramazzotti. Italien spicy stuff, and of course I’ve never been able to get it here in Sweden. In our family, it’s lovingly called Rambazamba.
This week I got a letter from home which is always good, and in this was this. And at first I thought, oh yay, quadratisch praktisch gut and all that (which is the commercial slogan of Ritter Sport in Germany) and since it was red and I know my chocolate I thought it was marcipan (see?). Only when I looked again a few minutes later, I saw this:
And I went all OH MY GOD IT’S RAMBAZAMBA CHOCOLATE!!!!!!!!!!!!
Yes, in bold and capslock.
I also had to immediately make a pic to send it to Bouncy Haired Girl to go OMFG IT’S RAMB - you get the idea.
I’m so amazed that I haven’t even tried to taste it yet. Because look! Rambazamba chocolate! Letters from home make me happy.
(By the way, trivia for the day - my favourite’s nougat. Guess what colour that one has? Yah, I know, I’m so predictable.)
Anyway.
Doing a bit better today, I decided to stay home from work yesterday. Did a fair bit of stitching on Dragon Luck, which I will update when the next row is done. I also finally did the beading on Heart Beaded Biscornu. I don’t know - it looks alright, but I just don’t know how to bead really. If that makes any sense. This was the first time I’d done it. It’s okay for something pretty lying in a basket, but it doesn’t feel stable at all. Guess I will gave to find someone to tell me about proper technique. Yes, that’s a hint, ladies!
There are a few other new pics in the album where you can see it from other perspectives, too.
Popularity: 30% [?]
Tags: Biscornu, Finish, Heart Beaded Biscornu, Pesky Real Life, Polstitches
You know, that cold from hell? Very persistent.
I was just feeling okay again, getting rid of the normal post-cold cough and all, and now it’s back with a vengeance.
I hates it, my precious. Being sniffly is stupid. Also, sick to my stomach. My patients are giving me shifty looks, aka “You look sicker than me. GO HOME.” and all that.
I will go and sneeze some more now.
Popularity: 12% [?]
Tags: Pesky Real Life
Today I did a bit more on a project I’m working on for a swap bot exchange.
It’s a Quaker Sampler that was published in Gift of Stitching. It’s done on hand-dyed fabric from Polstitches, with Dragon Floss and Carrie’s Creations. 28c linen, one over one (yes, I think I’m officially insane.)
The exchange is spring themed, but if I can make it, I will do all four seasons.
Popularity: 18% [?]
Tags: Quaker Sampler, Stitching, WiP
