LITTERATURE. The medical students in the novel know. That the kidney is a silent organ, that the heart is a muscle – and that there is no way to save all patients. The author and medical resident Annika Paldanius is using her medical knowledge to help in her literary debut.
“I know all this” is an internal medicine fictional novel, perhaps the first ever. The doctor and author Annika Paldanius introduces essentially all the chapters in the book with the words “I know that . . .” These are followed by descriptions of what the main character, Hanna, is learning in the doctors course and of student life. She goes to parties, has a love affair, works and studies for exams.
“The book plays out in an environment which is of course well known to me, but is nonetheless entirely fiction”, says Annika Paldanius, medical resident at the Sahlgrenska University Hospital.
Together with her best friends, Filippa and Anna, the novelistic figure of Hanna glitters through the Gothenburg night. At the same time, she does her internship in the various departments of internal medicine at Sahlgrenska and looks death straight in the eye both in her work and in her private life.
She is exceedingly involved in what she is learning at the moment, and observes people in her surroundings based on their breathing, heart rate and skin, as Annika Paldanius tells it.
The doctor is to know how many bones there are in a human body (about 200), how a tumor in the thyroid gland feels under the fingers, and how the renin- angiotensin system is activated in the event of heart failure. When Hanna falls in love she notices her new boy friend’s subcutaneous fat, and says that it “looks dangerous from a cardiovascular standpoint”.
“I have utilized a linguistic embellishment and I have taken the descriptions to the limit. It is not important to understand all the words”, says the author.
Annika Paldanius takes a break from her job in Occupational and Environmental Medicine to talk about her debut novel. She has forgotten to turn off her telephone and its signal blares through Sahlgrenska’s section of the medical residences. She is a little uncomfortable in an interview situation, even though her book has received exceedingly fine reviews and many want to know who she is.
“I have written as long as I can remember, and I think it is fun to do. Sometimes stories which I have told others turn up”, she says.
Annika Paldanius finished the doctor’s course in 2005 and then did her internship in her hometown of Jönköping. For a couple of years now she has been back again in the city of her student years, now employed as a medical resident at the Sahlgrenska University Hospital. In the department of Occupational and Environmental Medicine she makes risk evaluations and analyzes ill health linked to people’s work lives.
“In part it is exciting to find the causes underlying various illnesses, and in part it is extremely important to do preventive work so as to be able to root out dangerous factors”, she says.
Even though Annika’s choice of specialty is distant from the dramatic workday of her novel’s character, she is as interested as Hanna in the great existential questions. And the next book project, which she is unwilling to talk about, will involve approximately the same theme. Life and death, love, friendship, and the meaning of everything. Although that story won’t play out in a hospital environment, she says.
“It took me nearly seven years to finish my first book, so it may take a while before the next one comes out. It will perhaps again take an equally long time.”
BY: LOTTA ENGELBREKTSON
PHOTO: EMELIE ASPLUND
Name: Annika Paldanius
Age: 30 years old
Occupation: Medical Resident; have also studied writing at folkhögskolan Biskops Arnö.
Residence: In Gothenburg
Current: With debut novel “I know all this”.
About writing on the job: Have heard that I am a person of very few words and that I use dry prose when I write in the medical records
