Friday

Friday was finally my first day on the floor, and it was fantastic. I got to take care of a little guy who was so mild and quiet, a total pleasure for the first day. His "mum" was around and helped me more than I helped her. My ward is divided into three departments: special care, high dependency and intensive care. I am starting on the special care side and will hopefully be working my way up to the itty-bitty babies on respirators before I go back to DK. The babies in special care are typically on their way home. They take SIDS (Sudden Infant Death Syndrom , for the Danes reading this) very seriously here (which is funny, because it made me realize that I'd never heard them talk about it in DK), so the babies are swaddled and tucked very tightly into the "cots". I'm still horrified by the hygiene of the department, and as far as I can tell, so are all the other foreign nurses living with us here at Callan Park. I'm trying so hard to keep my mouth closed, but there are some terrible things. They'll change a baby's diaper and move the dirty, poopey diaper from under the baby, roll it loosely, and put it down in the cot, instead of just put it in the garbage can. ACK. They don't wash the cots daily like in DK, only weekly. Seriously though, I'm going to have to really try not to focus on it because I could go on and on. After in-service (about discharging the babies), I got home and died. It's always like that after the first couple of days in a new praktik.