Let's learn about the heart

Up at the crack of dawn this morning which means....drum roll please... I'm over my jet lag! *crowds cheering* I thought I'd take advantage of my well-rested brain and and teach myself how to read an ECG. I remember touching on it briefly in school but being told "most nurses don't need to know how to read an ECG," which I wish had been followed by a "but they really should learn anyways." I guess it was probably one of those things I told myself that I could learn later on in my own time but then never followed up....until I started working in a cardiac unit. If anyone has any good tools for learning this, I'm all ears!

Many hours later......

It was a quiet day on the unit today, our only patient, who was from Iran, was stable, independent and had about a dozen family members trickle in throughout the day. You could literally see his mood improve as the hours passed by. It's always nice to see patients with lots of family in to visit them. Here in Qatar, family is of the utmost importance and we definitely see that on our unit.  Family comes before anything else. "Many Arabs have a very different order of personal priorities to those of most westerners," writes Jeremy Williams in Don't they know it's Friday? "Arab reaction to their immediate family situations is generally far greater than that undertaken, or expected, in western society," he says.

Also different from western society is the responsibility of some male Qatari children to make decisions on behalf of females, if the father is no longer living. Case in point: an elderly woman with many children, let's say 6, needs to have a life saving procedure done but her husband has passed away. That decision, regardless of what she wants, rests with her eldest son, at least in this case. To complicate matters is the fact that if a Qatari wishes to have a medical procedure performed at a hospital in the U.K. or in the U.S. because it happens to specialize in that procedure, the Qatari government will fly them there and and pay for the procedure. They'll even send along one doctor and one nurse. No, really!

Throughout the hospital, there are separate areas for men and women to pray, wait and be admitted.


 I was feeling really good about the fact that I brought a lunch to work today. Wait, what was I thinking? The cafeteria sells really good Indian food for about $3 a plate. We may have to rethink that decision tomorrow. I went to put my lunch in the nurse's lounge only to discover there is no fridge in the nurses lounge. What the? But where do nurses put their lunch? My preceptor told me she has a big meal before she comes to work and then just brings along some snacks. Come to think of it, all the fridges I have ever seen in staff lounges in hospitals back home have been DISGUSTING!! Corners full of sticky old...who knows what? Lunches so old their owners have long forgotten about them and given up all ties to favoured tupperware pieces. I can't imagine not having a fridge for unit staff back home. There would be mutiny for sure! No big deal, I thought. I'll just let my lunch sit out on this counter for about four hours, it was only in the sun for a little while, it should be OK right? The counter looks pretty clean.....

Luckily it was someone's birthday and they brought in something to share:

Sorry lunch.

Something else I learned about nursing in Qatar: a new nurse makes about 6,300 Rial or $1,700 US dollars a month. And get this: each year the Hamad Medical Corporation, which oversees the Heart Hospital, will pay for one return plane ticket for each of its staff nurses.