Ambulance never comes

Couple of months ago my friend was working in an institution which was taking care of residents with light to mild disabilities. He was employed in a night shift and his job was more or less to be there and intervene in the case of emergency. He was always in the shift with one other person and for most of time there he was killing time until...

One of the residents went to the bathroom slipped, fell and hit her head on the sink hard. When my friend and his collega got up there, the resident was lying on the floor in a puddle of blood that just kept comming. You need to have in mind that neither my friend nor the person that was working with him don't have any medical training. Ofc they acted instantly one of them started helping the resident and the second one called the ambulance. My friend was the one who called the ambulance. He explained what had happened and asked if they could send a team over to his workplace. The doctor said that they re not comming out for that, explained what to pay attention to and hang up the the phone. In the end everything was fine, fortunately the resident just cut his skin and while it looked ugly it wasn't serious.

When we met for a coffe and he told me the story I was mortified. I asked him "but what did you do when the doctor said they will not be sending an ambulance over?" And he just replied that they helped the resident, cleaned him up, put him to bed and check up on him every half an hour." He asked me in response "Why? What would you have done?"

Well, if I was in his position, I would look up for the symptoms of the heart attack and call again in 5 min from my private phone. When the ambulance would come and they would figure out it was not a heart attack I would tell them that I called and that they refuesed to come and I needed them because a person in my care is potentialy in a life threatening situation and neither me and my colleague are not medicaly educated.

After couple of weeks I got the follow up on the story. He disucussed the events of that night with his boss. The boss praised him for his actions and said that he did everything by the book. He asked him what would have happened if his resident died because of the internal bleedeing or something similar? Nothing, him and his colleague would still get the flying colors for handling the situation because of the way they handled it and the eventual death of the resident wouldn't be their fault. He also asked what would have happened if he got the ambulance to come by missleading them. He would be fired. It seems that even in these kind of situations the priority isn't the life of the person in your care, it is following rules and guidelines and I thought it was the other way around...

After talking to a couple of other people that moved to Denmark from the Balkans, it turns out that all of us had similar experiences with Danish ambulance. They just ain't coming unless you are about to die.

I was curiouse why is it that way. The reason is that Denmark has understaffed hospitals and emergency service. I should correct myself. They are not understaffed, they are minimally staffed, they just have enough personel to keep their hospitals and emergency service running. So if have a medical emergency in Denmark, you might as well save yourself the trouble and skip on the call because they most likely will not come.

Copehagen, elevatores and people with disabilities

When I arrived to Denmark one thing surprised me, the lack of elevators. In most buildings I have been in, there is simply no elevators. Ok, truth be told most of the buildings in Copenhagen have up to 5 levels and you would think that in buildings this high elevatores are not needed. But what if most of the city has buildings of this size? Do you still don't need elevatores?

One day I took this up with my girlfriend. Her first reaction was: "But who needs elevators? And why would you waste money on elevators?"

And at first it made sense, buildings aren't that high and most people can walk, so no issues there. But when I started thinking about it a bit more, the correct answer is the other way around. There is only one category of people who don't need elevators and that is healthy adults without children. Everybody else needs elevatores: elderly people, small children, parents with small children, adults with some illness or injury, pregnant women and especially people with disabilities.

One thing, in relation to the elevators that I find a bit at odds with each other is the fact that the streets of Copenhagen are very accessible to people with disabilities and Danish healthcare system is giving out moving aids to people with disabilities. But I just can't shake the feeling that when you combine this with the lack of elevatores in the whole city you get a funny contradiction. People with some movement imparing disability will have no problems going around the city but when they reach the building where they live, unless they are blessed with an elevator, they can't reach their apartments. Maybe I am exagurating, but that contrast really seems a bit off to me. What is the point of all the mobility aids for people with disabilities when they can't reach their homes? Are there neighbourhoods for people with disabilities? If there are how is that different from ghetto areas? And what about adults that suffer some injury? Are they forced to move out of their apartments because suddenly they can't reach them or leave them?

And there is actually one thing that I see as a cruel joke, that was, I guess ment as an aid. I saw it in a couple of buildings. In one particular building there are a couple of old ladies that have a very hard time walking. When they are walking on the flat surface they need to stop and catch some breath every 15 to 20m. You know what the building administration did to help them? They installed a small foldable metal chairs on levels between the floors so they can sit down. While I understand that is supposed to help them but to me it looks like a cruel joke.

Instead of elevatores most buildings in Copenhagen have frontstairs and backstairs. Frontstairs don't need explaining, it's just normal staircases that people use to get to their apartments. Backstairs, now that is something that needs explaining. Back stairs usualy connect the apartments to their backyards, if the building has one. But the main reason for them is second escape option in case a fire starts. 

Copanhagen had a number of nasty fires through out it's history and back stairs were implemented as a second fire escape option. You need to understand how does the average backstairs look like. They are very narrow, steep with very sharp turns and they are not uniform. When I say not uniform what I mean is that the number and form of steps can vary between different floors. So there can be lets say 10 steps of a certain height between 1st and 2nd floor and then 12 steps between 2nd and 3rd floor. Out of those 12 steps two of them have bigger surface area and are lower then the other steps and so it varies between the floors. Trust me, back stairs ain't a thing where you wanna run in the case of a fire. The chances are you will trip, fall and kill yourself if you need to run from a fire on the backstairs. I would rather chance it with a blanket on the mainstairs then on the backstairs. 

I must say that for me, in the modern day backstairs seem just obsolete and useles. I don't see a good reason why shouldn't backstairs be replaced with an elevator so that even non adult healthy people can reach their apartments without problems. Just tear down the back stairs. Some people told me that building an elevator would be too expensive. How come that building balconies on buildings without them isn't too expensive?

Dogs

One common mistakes of all Scandinavian countries is that they are a bit overprotective of their citizens. When they figure out that some activity has the slightest chance of causing harm. They will immediately regulate it by law so that the possiblity of harm comming to you is reduced as much as humanly posssible.

I had an opportunity of witnesing that when I was volunteering at Roskilde festival. I was assigned to the refund station, where we were basicaly sorting cans and other refundable wares. On the beginning of my second shift a woman came to me, waited until I finshed my work and then she told me: "In one of the refund stations, one time a person went in with her arm straight into the bag with cans and a needle got stuck under her fingernail. Because of that we do not do it that way any more but...". After she told me that I started to think about how huge Roskilde festival is. You have more then 20000 volunteers running it and there was one accident of that type once in more then 20000 people. So, it was a freak accident and they are trying to regulate it. I do feel for that person, it was certainly painful and maybe dangerous but it was still a freak accident. I do not think you can regulate against freak accidents. If there was a pattern I would understand but when it is a one off...

And that is how it is in general in Scandinavian countries an allegedly even people living here started to realize it is going a bit to far with this overprotective behaviour.

One moment where I find it really sad is with dogs. Even though I miss my ex-wife dog that I left in Croatia, I must say that I wouldn't like to have a dog in Denmark. With overregulation they knocked out all the charm of it. Often times I get the feeling that dogs are being treated like a vicous blood thirsty animals that are just waiting to slay a human. Since I came to Denmark I haven't seen dogs playing anywhere ever. The reason is that the fines of having a dog walking without a leash are huge and the only place you can let it roam free is in the so called dog forest. Yes, it is just what it sounds like. It is a fenced patch of forest, far far away from other humans where you can go and let your dog run free. 

On couple of occasions when we went to some nice nature site, where you see couple of people here and there. Even in those places dogs were still being walked on a leash because someone may call the police, I must say that is just sad. But one time, I was smoking out on the street at the small intersection and I saw a woman passing by with her small dog and then I heard she said sorry in Danish. I turned around to see what is she appologising for, there was another man walking his dog and that woman appoligised because her dog wanted to sniff the other dog. I described the situation to my girlfriend and asked her what was that all about. She said that the woman appologised because her dog went to sniff the other one and that is looked down upon because it is taken as a sign that you don't have a control over your pet. At that point you know it is going too far, since sniffing is just so basic and instinctual dog behavior and that is being looked down upon.

Do I need to mention that some dog breeds that have the reputation of being more agressive are illegal. It translates into that if you already own a dog of that breed, you can keep it but it must be constantly on the leash with a muzzle and if anything happenes, fx. display of agression to another dog, he will have to be put down. Also, these breeds are illegal to grow, buy, sell and import. 

Funny enough that law backfired a bit. Couple of years back, wolves migrated to southern part of Jylland and some danish farmers started having problems with wolfes attacking their livestock. In order to protect their heards they wanted to buy some mastiff dogs but they couldn't because they are illegal. So their possibilities, legally are very limited because all dog breads that would be good protection against wolfs are illegal. I think that also tells that Denmark went too far.

I love dogs and I miss having a dog but I think that because of all insane restrictions for dogs and dog owners in Denmark, neither dogs nor dogs owners are having a great time here.

Having too much

I come from a country that doesn't have the best living standard in the world but it definitely isn't that bad to live in. While paychecks are lower for more then half of what you get in Denmark, you can get by if you are just moderately careful with money. Main difference that I can notice in spending is mostly on fluff stuff. You still have plenty of money to buy and have everything you need to live a normal life like: place to live, food and other basic necessities. What you will lack after you pay all that is for other things. You will have less to spend money on things you do not need, like candy, rice cookers, carrot peeler, newest versions of smartphones etc. As an acquaintance from the Croatian ghetto said : "We have everything the Danes have, the main difference is that in Croatia it will take you 3 paychecks to buy new iPhone and in Denmark 1/3 of the paycheck." After living in Denmark for some time I started wondering are there any detrimental sideffects of high living standard? I think there are.

Higher living standard entails greater buying power and greater buying power leads to couple of not so great consequences.

First one is that you can pay your way out of a lot of things. Often people will choose to pay for some things rather then do it themselves. Even though they are perfectly capable of doing it and they have the time to do it but they have money so they can pay to somebody else to do it instead of them. While that on it's own doesn't sound bad, but it can lead to complete incompetence in executing some everyday tasks that I would never even consider outsourcing to somebody else, like cleaning the apartment or painting the walls or cooking.

I think this is one bad consequence of living in a first world country. The excess of money basically leads to people going into a very narrow specializations in life that makes them very depended on others in every single aspect of their lives. Literary for everything other then what they do for a living, they kinda become idiot savants that are great at what they are doing but can't do anything else.

Second bad consequence of having too much money is that people just become too trigger happy at spending it. It seems to me that is one of the causes of an obesity epidemic running wild in Denmark. If you have much more money that you need and you like munching candy and chugging down sodas, there is nothing to stop you from doing that, because you don't need to think if you are going to have enough or not. So you can just stuff your face with it all you want, so latter you can start crying how you have gotten fat and spend money on gyms, spinners, dieticians, slimming food supplements, healthy food, personal trainers etc. But none of that helps anymore 'cause you can't control yourself anymore but it doesn't matter anyways you have more than enough so why not?

Third bad consequence of too much buying power is excess! And you can see it everywhere. Articles that are on offering in the normal stores, number of stores like Offertisima or Pepco that sell useless shit that no one needs, number and type of a wide variety of different hobby stores which are obviously thriving. You can also tell about excess in peoples needs and wants. In stuff that are considered necessary for normal everyday life (cheese cutters, potato peelers, rice cookers etc), having a pot and a knife just doesn't cut it anymore. 

You can also see it in the people criteria for the adequate size of the living space. Newest example that I saw was when we visited a friend. He just moved in to a new house with his girlfriend. The house is huge: two bathrooms, 3 bedrooms, one huge living room plus kitchen. That is a house for 4 people but not more! I grew up with my parents in a 30 square meters apartment with one room, kitchen, bathroom and hallway. While I was a kid it was ok but in this apartment you could have 4 children and parents.

I must say that after I moved here I see what does it mean to live above the level of what is actually needed. I think that people could live with much less and be happy, but consumerism and modern economy is taking it's toll and there is no way back which may not be the best thing in the long run but that is a topic for another entry.