Welcome to Uppsala!

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I arrived in Uppsala safe and sound with a little help from Oskar and Anna. If they had not agreed to drive me to the train station, I would have had to drag my huge bags two miles along the road in the pouring rain so I was very happy for their help!

Uppsala is a university town with about 200,000 people so it is significantly larger than Mora. The hospital is a University Hospital so the doctors are used to teaching people. The hospital itself is very large and is comprised of over 20 different buildings so it was a miracle that I found my way to the right floor of the right ward of the right building.

I am staying at Uppsala Hospital in their hostel rooms (I forgot to take pictures so I will add some later). It is a little sparsely furnished but the room works just fine and I do not have to share my room with anyone so that is nice.

The two days I have spent at the hospital have flown by. It is a 20 minute walk from the hotel to the hospital but my path follows some pedestrian shopping streets, a river, a swan pond, and gardens so it is an enjoyable walk. I am spending the week in the cardiology department, an area of medicine that I am completely unfamiliar with.

It seems like the doctors here are a little more stressed and busy than they were in Mora. Although my treatment there was probably an exception (I do not expect everyone to be able to take me aside to show x-rays, internet programs, and models for two hours) I have not had very much time with doctors who can explain everything in detail. I think they often assume that I have a level of knowledge that is above where I actually am, although I have told them that I know nothing about cardiology. However, I am still learning a lot through observation and I greatly appreciate any time that someone takes to explain something to me.

The doctors start their day with rounds and they discuss each patient in detail. They come up with a plan of action and decide on medications before visiting the patient and talking with them. It is interesting to watch this part of the day because the attending doctor lets the interns do the problem solving but leads them in the right direction.

The doctors then all get together for a radiology round and look at angiograms, which are amazing images of the heart where contrast dye is used to make the coronary arteries visible. You can watch the blood pumping through the arteries and see if there is a spot on the arteries that is too narrow, causing decreased or stopped blood flow.

I have had the opportunity to watch a coronary angioplasty (also known as PCI), where this narrowing of the blood vessels is fixed by sticking a catheter up the wrist into the coronary arteries and a balloon is used to expand the artery so a metal stent can hold it open permanently.

I have also seen a couple of stress tests where the patient exercises on a bike while their heart is monitored for imbalances or abnormalities.

I am getting several opportunities to work on my Swedish here, which is both good and bad. Some of the nurses do not speak Swedish so I have to speak Swedish, but this forces me to practice and learn, although I often do not know what is going on.

In my time outside of the hospital, I have been running around trying to do all sorts of tourist things. Yesterday I walked around the castle (built by Gustav Vasa) and the Botanical Garden. Today I went to the home and botanical garden of Linnaeus (the botanist who came up with the binomial nomenclature of all organisms), Domkyrkan (the largest cathedral in Scandinavia), and the Carolina Rediviva (the university library containing a 1500 year old bible). I am running around like a madwoman trying to see everything before I leave on Friday!

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Photos

Tubes of Caviar
One of the many things Swedes put into tubes