I spent the last day of 2012 with working thirteen hours, and exactly so will I spend the first day of 2013. The new year doesn’t seem to bring a significant change in my lifestyle.
Sorry for the even-poorer-than-usual quality of the photo – I made it with my phone while drinking champagne.
I don’t know how did I deserve it but I had three extremely relatively nice and peaceful night shifts in a row.* That’s what I call an unearned present.
So I will now put my feet up for an hour, drink a coffee, listen to this song and imagine that I’m there.
* well, so far, at least. I still have 5 hours to go until the end of my shift and in this business of nursing you never know what is yet to come.
I haven’t done night shifts in the last eight years so I totally forgot how nice the feeling is when you are alone in the middle of the night, everybody is well and asleep, peace guides the planet and love steers the stars.
P.S.: I didn’t even finish writing down this sentence when the ambulance team of the Red Cross unexpectedly showed up at the door, exactly at 1.30 am. That’s also a feeling I totally forgot.
I started the day at my father’s hospital, asking doctors rhetorical questions like where do you think we are, in the film The Cuckoo’s Nest?*; continued running amok to catch my train, travelled six hours back to Salzburg and arrived with an only 30 minutes delay to my twelve-hours-long night-shift. This is my personally developed guide on how to live on 24 hours a day.
* no, it’s not a psychiatry ward for ordinary criminals but it could easily be mistaken for it if it comes to the attitude of the personal. Their main policy is: your patient is your enemy. My relationship with them is now the following: I hate them and they hate me. I spent the last 10 days with throwing tantrums daily and accusing nurses and doctors with dilettantism and murder. None of them will ever know that I’m a genuinely nice person who was brought up to be polite and forthcoming even with her own killers.
During the past three weeks I paused this project due to the sudden, very serious illness of my father. Neither did I have time for photography nor did I feel appropriate taking photos of my workday dinner plates while having so much other things to worry about. Now things seem to stabilize a bit and I’m sort of back in my regular life and to this project.
I planned to write about our infamous health care system and about how fragile and vulnerable you get at the moment you are put at the mercy of our health care professionals but really, it just has no sense at all. While it’s definitely not okay and makes me a very bad conscience, at this moment all I feel about Hungary is shame. I look at our politics, the way people interact each other, their mentality and its impact on everyday life and I feel shame for being Hungarian. And I look at the nurses in our hospitals, the lack of their professional knowledge, the way they communicate with patients and take care of them (or, actually the way they don’t take care of them), and I feel shame for being a nurse, I feel shame for ever having been part of this ridiculous game called Hungarian Health Care System.
I surely am pretty irritated right now and there surely are exceptions, of course. It’s just like I’d have lost the last of my illusions and the hope that things can ever get better in this country of corruption and desperation.
