Sjuksköterskestudenter utomlands

This is day 6 I am at home, waiting for my body to recover. I do now know that I have a virus-infection. Probably caused by my little brother who got it from his girlfriend. The virus who follows me took away 3 days from my internship, but there is still time to catch up. I haven’t even told you yet about the working-hours here at my ward. There are 2 different shifts: dayshift and nightshift. At dayshift you work 07.00-19.30 and at nightshift 19.30-07.00. Sometimes you can leave earlier at 15.30 from the dayshift. Most people I talk to about my working-hours here think it is hard, but actually I find it much more comfortable to work 07.00-19.30 2 days in a row rather than like we have it in Sweden 13.30-22.00 and the day after 07.00-15.30. I feel that these few hours in the evening give a lot more back than having so few hours to recover the day after. And working 12 hours each shift gives you a lot more free time the rest of the week. At my internship I have to work 3-4 days per week and the rest of the week I have for myself and all my other studies.

At my time at home I had time to draw more pictures of the ward, so you can see how it looks like:

I am a little bit unhappy for the quality of the pictures at WordPress-blog here, but I can not help it – wordpress cuts them down to 100 mb. On this picture you can see me sitting on the old leather-coach in the lunch-room. On the table you can see a big chocolate-cake: the staff at my ward love to eat chocolate with nuts. So most of the shifts someone buys a big chocolate for everybody to enjoy. You can also see the glasses with differ name-tags. If you work a shift you have a glass with your name-tag on so you can use it the whole shift. In front of me you can see my food. At the hospital I have the pleasure to buy lunch for a reasonable prize which means I get warm lunch every day at work and I do not have to bring my own food with me – a luxury I really like and would like to have at home (but there the food is expensive and you have to get it on your own). Every morning we get to choose and write down which food we would like and than one staff gets down to get the food from the kitchen. On my pants you can see that people usually write down information about their patient. This is a habit I still not have been doing, but I wanted to show you how it looks like on my fellow colleagues.

This drawing shows how it looks like in the kitchen. We have a big water boiler which gives hot water. When a patient wants tea we can take it from here. They have about 7 different kind of teas to choose from – which is great, we don’t have that at home! When someone likes to have a cup of coffee we have to mix the water with Nescafé instant coffee. On the desk you can see some different things, e.g. instant coffee and apple-juice brought by relatives to patients. So there are some patients who get there personal food/drinks – if they like to.

I hope to get back to my internship in two days. I have been to a greek-doctor today and he got me cough-medicin with codeine and antihistamine-tabletts against my swollen lymph. Interesting is that I found medicine which is no longer used in Sweden here in Austria. Besides the medicin I got from the doctor here (I do not know why Sweden no longer does distribute these medicines, but I know they have different ones which practically are the same) I found a medicine at the hospital which is called “Novalgine”. This medicine is not longer used in Sweden since 1999 since many people have experienced severe side effects and after a study the medication was stopped selling in Sweden. But, they still use it here in Austria. I think this is because Sweden has a different approach regarding medicine and side effects – in Sweden the nurses and doctors can tell there concern to the government, in Austria this is something only doctors do, sometimes, what I understood from the staff here.

Now I am getting my head back into Grey´s Anatomy, at least I can watch one hospital when I am not allowed to be at “my” hospital.

Bis bald! – See you soon!