Linköping's Children's Hospital

Mom with a row of babies

After that I took a job in Linköping's Children's Hospital which was one of the best in the country at that time. It was a big building that was part of a bigger hospital. The Children's Hospital building had separate floors for different specialities. On the bottom floor was where women came in and had their babies. There were a few private rooms but most of it was one big room. The second floor was for the smallest children, babies to 18 months of age. Then the third floor was for older children, from one and a half through 14 to 15 years old.  And there was a small sort of story up above that even where mothers could stay when they were nursing babies, but that wasn't a full floor, just a few rooms and a little kitchen. I liked the work here. At first, I was on the floor where babies were born. Mothers stayed in the hospital at least ten days then so we had a roomful of babies to take care of. We weighed them every day when we bathed them along with checking their temperatures and everything else. As part of our continuing education, we were required to go down and watch at least two babies being born. After witnessing that a couple times, I almost decided that I didn't want any children.

I think Mom is kneeling down on the balcony here. The
original is such a tiny photo that it's hard to tell.

This was the first time that I worked in a large organization and that was a bit of a lesson for me. There were so many nurses and doctors and it took quite a bit to all get along. The nurse who was in charge of one of the floors there, Sister Deece, didn't get along well with the personnel, and I didn't like her much either. There was a bit of a well not a disagreement exactly but sometimes the nurses with more education (they'd be RNs here) they looked down on us barnsköterska because we didn't have as much training as they did. Well, one time one of the doctors' wives was in having a baby and she was in one of the private rooms. She was given the wrong thing at one point and one of the other nurses told Sister Deece that I had done it, so Sister Deece came and chewed me out. I told her I wasn't on duty in those rooms that day and I hadn't even been in there. I suggested she ask the mother if it was me, so we went in there together and the lady said she had never seen me before. So it wasn't all happy times but I always learned a lot.

This hospital is also where I met Anna Pettersson! I was working at night

Anna Pettersson

one time and I sat there kind of glum for some reason. Anna worked on another floor but she came to where I was working and wanted me to go with to the dining room. We were not allowed to go alone to the dining room, especially in winter, because we had to go along all through the basement to get there and it was a little scary. Well, I agreed and off we went. Anna told me later that when she first saw me she wished she hadn't come to ask me because I looked like

such a sour puss! As we walked, Anna was telling me how nice it was to work on that other floor so I asked for a transfer. The manager on the other floor was a Sister Anna. She was very strict and ran a tight ship but that was ok with me. She was always fair and we all got along well.

One time there was a child there who needed to see an ear specialist.

This is a photo from one of Mom's albums, showing

the kind of equipment they used when she worked there.

They used to have some kind of mini-ambulances to take patients to these kind of appointments but there was none to be found this time. This ear doctor was right across the street from the Children's Hospital, so it was decided that I and one of these girls who worked to become an RN that we would carry him to the appointment. We had to walk around back through a gate there. The sister had given the gate key to the other girl and I was carrying the baby. It happened that this gate was right next to a little chapel where families would have the 

"singing out" ceremony after someone died. I've told you about that before. Well, we made it to the ear doctor and then were ready to head back to the hospital and there still was no ambulance to take us back, so we set out to walk back the same way we had come.

Later that evening, I was sitting and feeding a baby in the same room where a mother was feeding her baby when Sister Anna came in and scolded me for not returning the gate key. I reminded her that she had given the key to the other girl and that I was carrying the baby. I said I did not know where the key was but I could go look for it. After I was done feeding the baby, I was ready to set off and some of the other girls tried to tell me that I shouldn't go out by that funeral chapel in the dark alone. I said I wasn't afraid of that and set off. When I got to the gate, sure enough there was the key in the lock, so I took it back to Sister Anna.

Birgitta and Sören

Well, I didn't like that too much. I didn't like being blamed for things that I had not done. But years later, when Birgitta, Brita's oldest daughter was going to be a nurse, she had to work on different floors to learn how to care for the different age groups and it happened that Sister Anna was still working there and Birgitta got acquainted with her. Sister Anna told her how well she and I had gotten along and said that if Birgitta became as good a nurse I was and she was doing well. I thought that was pretty nice when Birgitta told me that.