Carl Tosterud - Tottes homepage

The Story about Carl

It all started some 25 years ago. A beautiful late summer day in August 1974, the 29th as a matter of fact, I was born at Karolinska Sjukhuset in Solna, just outside Stockholm. I guess I was just like every other kid, blue, ugly and smelled bad. The first couple of years I, my father Nils and my mother Birgitta, lived in a two room apartment in Jakobsberg which is a nice little place about 15 minutes outside Stockholm. Life was easy, everyone loved me and things were great, until one cold winter day in January 1977, after three years of peace and quiet, my brother was born. I guess he was like most kids as well, you know, blue ugly... Anyway, just after my mother had given birth to Björn, she lost here vision on both eyes. The doctors were baffled but a neurologist came up with the idea that it could be multiple sclerosis, MS. After just a couple of days she regained her eyesight and everything was pretty much back to normal. Since we now had become a real family, we had to move to our own house. That's what people in Sweden just has to do when they are a family, it is called the Svensson-syndrome. Anyway, we moved to a house on Majvägen just a block away from were the apartment was and here we lived happily for another ten years. My father worked with various things. He started of at a metal processing company and then continued to a telecom company, another telecom company and then to a german electronics company which sells connectors for the industry. This is where he is working today. Both my mom and dad are engineers, but my mother worked as one since she had us kids and the MS. We then moved to another house that had no stairs because my mother found it very difficult to run up and down the stairs in our old house. Well, I went through grammar school and then headed on to High School.

Somewhere around 1990, my parents got a divorce and dad moved to Nynäshamn, which is really out in the sticks. I studied "naturvetenskap" in the HS, which could be compared to a major in science in a foreign school. The first year went on smoothly and then I went to the US to become a foreign exchange student in Choctaw Oklahoma. I was there 1991-1992. I came home to the same boring HS and my grades dropped slowly. By the third year I was really tired of school and I decided to do something easier so I changed major to "samhällsvetenskaplig" (social and community major (yup I hated that translation)). But as I had almost finished my third and final year with my new major, I realized I wanted to study medicine in a university so I had to change back to science and redo my final year. The second semester I moved to Vimmerby, which is a small town in the southern part of Sweden, I changed school and teachers. I but you can imagine what that did to my grades. (They dropped of course). I finished HS in 1995 and after a three day long summer break I headed to the army for my service. I was in the "Royal Swedish Arctic Rangers" in Arvidsjaur as a medic and received somewhat of an officer rank (really low officer though...). After the year in the cavalry I started working as a youth consultant in the swedish Red Cross in Kalmar. I worked there for six months before I moved back to Stockholm. In Stockholm I worked as a bike delivery and then as a computer consultant.

In 1997 I decided it was time for me to start doing something about my grades so I could get into medschool. After half a year of completing my grades I started to study to be a nurse. Since I had been a medic in the army and had a verygood education in emergency care I had to be in school for a year, but after half a year I got into medschool and this is where I am now. During the spring and summer of 1998 I worked as a nurse in Karolinska Sjukhusets neurosurgery department.

This brings us up to date :)

I am soon going to be adding a lot to this story as soon as I get some spare time (right...)... a nurse (!).