Thursday

It's been a while since I last wrote (sorry Mom), which means that I have tons to write, but I think I'll break it up by day. So just when I thought all the intro was done, I show up at my department and find out that it's just more intro. Of course! After talking for the entire morning with my two advisors, I was sent to what they call "in-service", which is just basically nurses teaching nurses. I am not sure how they divide it up, but it's rather smart. The last hour of every day the nurses on the day shift go to in-service and learn about something, today it was thermal regulation in neonates. During the morning talks, we discovered that I was lacking a vaccination against pertussis - this wasn't popular with my department. The thing that pisses me off, though, is that these people have had photocopies of all my medical records for the past 10 months - you'd think they would notice this before I get there on the first day...! I was told that if I wasn't vaccinated against pertussis, I wouldn't be able to stay on the ward. GREAT. There was tons of confusion about the issue, and it was decided that I'd call my doctor in Denmark and find out what the deal was, since he'd only given me Di-Te, not pDiTe. SIGH. The Aussies looked it up and couldn't find any shot that didn't include pertussis, so naturally they assumed that I was confused about what I'd received, or that my Danish doctor was totally incompetent and couldn't record the vaccination properly in my booklet. And I wasn't about to let them poke me with needles either - these Australians are crazy with the meds! The nurses all have MRSA (ORSA in the US?) and they hand out antibiotics like candy (which then of course nobody takes for the prescribed period of time). Anyways, I said I needed to talk to my doctor before they poked me with anything, and they said if I didn't get poked I couldn't work there. But just in case I could, they sent me home with 100+ pages to read for the next day...