Today is the day when Sweden celebrates Christmas! Me… I’ve been at work all day. But I don’t mind working holidays since it makes me distracted from the loneliness that it can bring since I don’t have a family. Sometimes Christmas is super busy and sometimes it’s the exact opposite. For us today… half and half.

We started off the shift right off the bat with a patient that had to go to Tyler. It is not often that we are at a hospital in Tyler already at 5 am but this morning we rolled in to Mother France’s at exactly that time…

That is the warning sign that this will not be that nice day that we hoped for but a very busy day. And we were right because when we cleared this call dispatch gave us a transfer. What we call a LDT, Long Distance Transfer. That means that it goes out of our service area. This one was going to Cook’s Childrens in Fort Worth. It was a 2 hour and 16 minute drive there!

At this point we had already done almost 175 miles and it was only 8 am!!! We had to get home too and we still had 8 hours left of the shift.
To be able to make all that my partner suggested that we stopped at Ihop for some pancakes. I could not turn that down. Of course I had to have “Crepes” instead of pancakes but I must say that they are a little too chewy for me. I don’t know what Ihop is doing with them but I recall it was the same last time. The taste is perfect thou!

I was so full afterwards so it was good that we had a 1.5 hour drive back to our area.

We only got one more call actually but it was sort of a cruel reminder for me. A person had been found deceased by the daughter who came to pick up the person for Christmas. The sad part was that the person had been dead for approximately a week. At least that was when anyone could confirm they had seen the person alive. The smell was horrendous. I could smell it before I even went out of the truck! This person lived at a RV Park and I was just thinking to myself as I looked at all the neighbors trying to figure out what was going on; couldn’t they smell this? Didn’t they see the flies? It’s not a smell that goes away and even if it’s a dead animal, it has to be removed. Why did so many people ignore it? Why didn’t just someone wonder? Well now they certainly did as both EMS and law enforcement pulled up and tried to console a crying and shocked daughter. There are of course details to this case that I don’t feel needs to be exploited on my blog. I though want to emphasise that the family did what they could to contact the person without success and they didn’t have anyone close enough to check on him. But all those (nosy) neighbors…
It really reminded me of how ignorant the world has become to one another. Christmas or not Christmas. If you smell something weird, if you haven’t seen your neighbor in a while… check on them. Just check in their mailbox to see if the mail is there. Don’t be afraid to call someone (law enforcement for example) to help you out and raise your concerns. Just care about the people around you! It is so sad when we see situations like this.

When I came back to the station I found a little surprise for me from my coworker Summer.

After spending an hour thinking about the sadness in the last call and then come back to the station to find this… I cried! I am so blessed to have so many amazing people in my life! Even though I don’t have a family here in the US, I surely have a bunch of friends and love around me!