Joe Yates
Most of us moan about a 30-minute commute, but one nurse takes things to another level - flying more than 5,000 miles to get to her job.
Courtney El Refai, lives in Stockholm with her Swedish husband and their two-year-old daughter, but every month she hops on an 11-hour flight to San Francisco - where she works in a neonatal intensive care unit (NICU).
Courtney, originally from the US, moved to Sweden in 2022, but soon found herself missing her nursing career. After giving birth in early 2023, she and her family moved back to the States for a while before finally returning to Stockholm in December 2024.
Rather than give up the career she loved, the 31-year-old decided to keep her US job and turn it into the ultimate long-distance commute.
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Since January, she’s clocked up more than 30,000 miles and spent around $1,500 on flights... but she insists it’s worth every penny.
“If I work weekends, I get extra and if I’m training other nurses too, we get paid 25 percent more than normal staff,” she explained. “My work life balance is so much better now, I’m so far away I don’t feel the urge or obligation to pick up extra shifts."
Her pay is a big part of why the extreme travel makes sense for her. She picks up just four eight-hour shifts a month, yet the money stretches far further than it would in Sweden.
"If I worked one 12-hour shift in California I can pay for one month’s rent here,” El Refai shared.
The set-up means Courtney can stack her shifts back-to-back, giving her as much as six weeks off at a time. She stays with another nurse for $50 a night when she’s in San Francisco, leaving her scrubs and car there until her next visit.
“It feels like a mini vacation flying away to work because I’m flying away from my obligations at home and can catch up with my friends in the US,” she explained.
“The downsides are the time difference, it’s nine hours and it’s hard to chat to my daughter and being away from my family for 10 days.”
As for how much she'd be paid for the same work but in Sweden, she added: "From what I’ve looked at it’s the high-end of $30 per hour to work as a nurse in Sweden.
"In the US nurses are paid differently, in the San Francisco Bay Area they have the highest paid nurses in the country, and we have a nurse's union which a lot of other countries don’t have."
For now, Courtney’s keeping up her unique lifestyle - juggling long-haul flights, high-paying shifts, and the benefits of raising her daughter in Sweden, where daycare and healthcare are virtually free.
“It feels sustainable for quite a while,” she said. “I don’t plan on changing anything anytime soon.”