Trying out Swedish medical care (Antti)

Dragonbane Diary
Monday, June 26th, 2006
Älvdalen, Sweden

Tonight I was pondering if I should read manga or watch anime after another hard day but instead I decided to take out my trusty old computer and tell you about the Swedish medical care system.

Sweden is sometimes known as folkhemmet, people’s home. It has one of the best medical care systems in the world, as I found out. It all started about a month ago (I know, I should have written about it earlier but I have been quite busy here with my Playstation, umm, I mean at my workstation in the kitchen, yes ..)

On the night of the 2nd of June I couldn't get any sleep since I had a bad pain in my hip joint. The pain kept intensifying and at 02:00 am it was so painful that I had to ask for some help. Since no-one here could determine the reason for the pain we decided to call an ambulance.

The ambulance took some time to arrive since our school is quite an isolated place, but it arrived eventually. Out of the two paramedics the second spoke some Finnish so I was able to explain what was wrong with me, and since they couldn't find any injury they just gave me a shot of morphine and loaded me to the back of an ambulance.

The nearest hospital is in Mora and a ride there takes about 45 minutes, or one hour if you happen to run over a deer, what was exactly what we did.

So, after the local police had arrived at the site of the accident and let the poor animal from its suffering we arrived at the hospital where a friendly emergency room doctor poked me around, declared that he couldn't find anything wrong with me and at five o'clock in the morning I was carted to the orthopaedic ward.

Since all the rooms were occupied I had to spend my first hours in the corridor. I had a nice nurse who also spoke Finnish. She had moved to Sweden in the 70’s and she had a strange accent but I hadn't had much sleep that night and there was still some morphine left in my system I was glad that I didn't need to remember how the Swedish language actually works.

Around noon I got a place in a room and I was informed that I could go to X-ray fairly soonish. Well, I got to the X-ray at 17:00, a fairly futuristic looking donut shaped thing that had rotating bits inside.

After this brief interlude I was carted back to my room since the doctor wouldn't be around until the next day.

The only other time I’ve been in a hospital was when I was in the army and had to be three days in the central military hospital for asthma tests and I felt that I would die out of boredom, but that wasn't bad, at least then I could read the books and magazines that were strewn around the hospital, but since my Swedish isn't that good I couldn't even kill time that way.

Eventually the next morning came and the doctor could look at my X-ray pictures. He couldn't find anything strange either and since the pain was mostly gone they let me go. In the end no one could find anything strange in me, it wasn't a stress fracture that I feared it would be, or the bubonic plague that was jokingly suggested by Heiko over the phone. So whole episode stays as a mystery, most probably it was pain in the lower back that just had lost its way and ended up in my hip.

So, how much did this all cost? An ambulance ride to a hospital 60 km away at 03:00 am, 29 hours in hospital, including four meals, X-ray, a lot of painkillers and a taxi ride to the front door of our school? 50 crowns for the taxi, no other expenses, so if you get sick in the building camp, you can be sure that you are in good hands.

Antti Oksanen