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.

I’ve started working at Childrens’ and Adolescents’ psych, and the commute is killing me. Gah. Everyone’s nice though, so I hope I’ll get used to the additional two or three hours a day.

I will be off in a few minutes to see Bouncy Haired Girl and go to Louisiana (the museum, not the state) to see a fabulous Cézanne-exhibit. Yay! I hope my stomach behaves, it has been keeping me awake lately with incessant cramping. No fun.

I shall be back with you soonly, and there shall be funny cat pictures Promise

He shakes my hand and makes a little bow. Both he and his son have this adorable accent that makes me smile and tells me they’re from Finland originally.

He walks into the room and stops in front of the two visitor chairs.

“Please, sit down.” I tell them.

He looks from one chair to the other. “Which one?” He looks up nervously, then looks down again, touching first the one chair, then the other. “Which one? Which one should I sit on? Which one?” he murmurs. He seems lost and tortured.

“Take this one, dad,” his son helps, and he sits down on the right one.

This won’t be fixed with just pills, goes through my head.

We talk about how he normally has no problems taking care of himself. He lives in a house by himself, but lately his son has been staying overnight more often or he has been staying with the son’s family.

“A beautiful house, yesyes, I have to springclean, there’s so much to do!”

He’s wringing his hands and the torture is back in his eyes again, this hunted look that always shows up sooner or later when you have to live with a constant nagging anxiety.

He is like this almost all the time now, worrying, thinking in circles, never a calm minute. He gets scared at night and won’t calm down until everyone there is awake so he knows all are accounted for. 

He has had these problems before, they tell me, and he was treated with ECT and had done well for years afterwards.

“Oh, that was a great treatment,” he says. “Please, I just want this to go away. I just want to get better.”

I tell him he will be fine.  I call psychiatry and get him an appointment at two p.m.

When I tell him, the haunted look is back. “Oh, at two. Downstairs? Downstairs. At two? It’s eleven. What are we going to do?”

“It’s okay, Dad, we’ll go have lunch”, the son says.

“Oh, all right,” he says and stops wringing his hands.

“I hope all goes well later,” I say, and hold out my hand. He shakes it and gives another correct little bow. “Thank you very much,” he says. “And good luck with my case!”

 

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.

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.

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.