#windingroads

February 3rd, 2017

Day 15: Navigating to the Westfjords

It’s Friday!

Since last weekend’s awesome adventures, I have been looking forward to today all week! Because weekend means fun exploration and this week, I decided that I would rent a car and take an adventure out to where very little tourists venture during the winter: The Westfjords of Iceland.

But before I could get to the fun part of the day, I had to get through the work day in Cardiology. And today, like previous days, I found myself primarily in the cath lab watching ablations, coronary stenting, and pacemaker placements. For me, it was a relaxing experience to be able to sit, observe, and learn without taking on the additional responsibility of writing notes on patients. Not to say that I don’t find note-writing medically stimulating because it does require me to really think through diagnoses. But it was nice to just sit and learn on my own time without added pressure of doing work on the wards. And, really, who wouldn’t want to take a stab at the game “Find That Stenosis!” by coronary angio?

When lunch time came, I hurried my way over to the cafeteria in order to feed my hungry tummy and to sit and figure out my trip and catch up on the world (no WiFi in the cath lab). Lunch consisted of a chicken stew of some sort with rice, veggies, and salad (it seems that many of my lunches at Landspitali consist of some meat (I’ve had ham, fish balls, roast pork, chicken) and simple steamed vegetables (most commonly potatoes, carrots, broccoli). Simple but it did the trick, especially because the meal was so cheap with the 50% employee discount (less than $5.00! Can’t find that anywhere else in Iceland!). After having eaten the lunch itself by my lonesome because I didn’t see my team yet, I was approached by my Icelandic, Slovakian med student friend Kristin, to join her and her friend for lunch. And I did so while enjoying a conversation about all things rotations, medical school, and Landspitali.

After lunch, Kristin and I went to grab my camera because she was nice enough to be an Icelandic model for my “A Photo A Day” series! And she got to be the first of many people I’m hoping to photograph in Iceland and abroad. And to give you some background, before this trip, I decided that I really wanted to take the opportunity to take portrait shots of people native to the countries that I visit. It would not only give me a chance to practice my street photography and portraits, but it would give me a chance to talk to those people and learn about them and for them to learn about me. And because I started taking more pictures of people during my last trip abroad to Asia, I wanted to continue doing it while coming up with more creative and dramatic ways to take the portraits during my travels! And so, this was a start! And very fortunately for me, Kristin was very used to modeling outside in the Icelandic cold and wind because her mom is actually a photographer as well! No wonder she was so patient with me!

After bidding farewell and good luck to Kristin since it was her last day, I promptly got permission to head home and get a jumpstart on my weekend. When I got home, the Sixt Rental Car Pick-Up Service was already waiting for me and before long, I had my Suzuki S-Cross 4WD and was ready to head out with all my bags and snacks for a…. 48 hour trip to the Westfjords.

And man, the trip was a long one, especially after working this morning. And it would’ve been more fun, but longer, had I made a ton of stops that were suggested to me by Gretar, one of Thor’s friends who I met last weekend and who I was staying with in Ísafjörður. But instead of stopping at all the places, I decided to pick one spot that was easy to locate while driving. So the first and only real stop: Akranes. Akranes is a little town north of Reykjavik on the edge of a small peninsula and it’s the town that’s just past the underwater tunnel outside of Reykjavik. So, once I got to the town, I aimlessly drove around trying to find the lighthouses that I was told to check out. And after making some random turns here and there, I finally found them standing in the distance.

And it was a unique stop because there were not one but two lighthouses there! Both very different and both difficult to photograph. After walking around to find a good perspective for the shot I was going for, I decided that I had spent enough time there and that the rain starting to come down was not something I wanted to be stuck in. So off I went, out of Akranes and eventually back to Hwy 1 (aka The Ring Road). I drove through a couple of towns and villages on my way north, most notably Borgarnes, Búðardalur, and Hólmavík. And actually, this trip and route were somewhat familiar to me from my last visit to Iceland and the two-day trip I took at that time up to Hólmavík and Snaefellsnes.

A quick pit-stop in Hólmavík and an expensive hot dog later, I was back on the road for one of the most treacherous drives of my life so far. And why was it treacherous? First, the route included a very, very dark mountain pass with very little railing and zero lights…. ice and snow on the two-lane road winding through the mountain, fog and snow all around in the air, with few passing cars. Oh, and did I mention, dark, windy, icy, lonely mountain road? Yup, so that was the first leg of the second half of the trip, from Hólmavík to the beginning of the fjords. It was quite scary at times with all the darkness around with no view of what might be sitting roadside, like a cliff, a lake, the center of the earth… things like that… So I found myself driving a little more cautiously because I was actually terrified I might fall off the Earth while driving through. The next part that was unnerving was the fact that the snow on the ground had become ice and that the car would slip a little from time to time…. Yeah, my heart was beating hard…. my eyes focused and my hands stuck to the steering wheel.

After what seemed like ages (but probably more like 45-60 minutes), I got through the mountains, only to find myself in quite a different, but equally terrifying, predicament. Driving through the winding roads of the fjords.... in pitch black darkness with little roadside railing to separate the road… from the ocean…  and 2 hours of it… This was even scarier than the mountains because of how windy the roads were, with wide turns through each individual arm of a fjord. And the dark silence around me was what kept my eyes glued to the road. Again, barely anyone on the road and a vacuum of darkness surrounding the minimally-headlights-lit road.

After about 1.5 hours passed, I finally saw some lights in the distance and got excited because I thought I had finally arrived. But nope, it was just Súðavík, the village just before Ísafjörður. So, I continued my drive in the darkness and finally see the town of Ísafjörður with its houses, buildings, and lights in the distance. And at 10:30pm, I decided that I was done driving for the day and headed straight to Gretar’s apartment. A short night of chatting and planning for the next day and I was off to bed, hoping for an early wake-up tomorrow to start the day’s adventures.

5 Things I Learned Today:

1. Supposedly, in the Slovakian medical school Jessenius Faculty of Medicine, a lot of the studying and learning that students do are based on bookwork and learning the small, science-y details (pathophysiology) of medicine. According to Kristin and others, little time is spent on clinical-styled learning and more emphasis is put into learning the nitty-gritty details that you end up forgetting anyways. And supposedly, it’s the opposite for Icelandic medical students, who have more clinically-focused coursework.

2. In Europe, most access sites for cardiac catheterization procedures are at the radial artery, not the femoral artery like it is in the U.S. About 90% occur at the radial according to one of the interventional cardiologists I spoke with. She mentioned that the reason for using the radial access point rather than the femoral was because it’s easier to control bleeding there and it’s more comfortable for the patient. When asked why the U.S. uses the femoral access site more, she says it’s probably because we’re more conservative in the approach.

3. I don’t know how to make the most of a 4W drive car… Does it just work on its own or do I do something to make it work…?

4. Iceland in the dark…. is very dark. And is completely different than Iceland during the day. The difference is like Day and Night…. Who would’ve thunk?