Knowing your worth

I have a big admiration for people who fight for their or others rights. People who don’t just sit back and take it. These are the people who have realized their own worth and are demanding others to see it to. These are the people we owe our basic rights to. One might think it’s easy, speaking your mind and protesting, “complaining” as some people call it, but basically it’s going against what your being told your worth and deserve, and not many people can do that.

In the north of Sweden some people are upset about loosing their local ambulance and their local ER because of budget cuts, politicians have presented alternatives like an emergency car that can give treatment but not transport the patients but so far the people aren’t going for it. There are a lot of sides to the story and I don’t intend to give a play-by-play of the discussion. I just mention it because I think it’s impressing that people are protesting instead of accepting that the politicians probably had some medical expertise involved that said it would work. I think it’s really cool that they are making it heard that they don’t accept being treated like second class citizens just because they live in a difficult geographical area of the country.

Recently I talked to a friend about young doctors working conditions in different hospitals. She had heard from some people that they were really happy with their nightshifts because they got to sleep up to two hours on a 16 hour shift – that was so much better than what they had experienced in other hospitals. There was a bit of a pride in having worked straight through the night and feeling that this shift (with two hours of sleep) – that my friend considered hard – was in fact a piece of cake, they were a bit tougher and faster, just a tiny bit more badass than the others. As my friend pointed out the agreement between our union and the region is that we actually have a right to four hours of sleep during a 16 hour night shift. So why are we acting all happy about being denied our rights? Why is it cool to have worked crossed-eyed through the night not giving the patients the time and attention they need? And I don’t care what anybody says, working straight through the night non-stop with patients doesn’t give the best patient care no matter how good of a doctor you think you are!

Young doctors are told that this is what they can expect, this is what they are supposed to be able to manage, but it’s not true. There are people who just like the old folks in the north of Sweden at one point said that it just wasn’t acceptable to have those kinds of working conditions and fought for our rights. If these people were living in a half deserted village in the coldest north of Sweden they probably would be happy not to have any medical care nearby – they would consider it cool to freeze to death after a car accident, they probably would think of themselves as just a tiny bit more badass than the people in the city nearby that rely on sissy things like ambulances and emergency rooms.

Christ, sometimes very intelligent people can be surprisingly dumb…