The Four Things I Used to Do

I was working today (I know shocker!) and I did a dictation on an elderly gentleman who has a brain tumor. My doctor suggested to him that the risks of the operation would far outweigh the benefits. When I first started this job, I did four things all of the time:

First, I would instantly have all of the symptoms that every patient had or my children would have the symptoms! My poor Garrick would come in and say that he had a headache and I assumed tumor. My poor Natalie would come in and say that her neck hurt and I assumed meningitis. I would have an innocent scratch on my arm and I assumed I had a flesh-eating bacteria. Anyway, after transcribing for a little while, I learned to suppress those feelings because I felt like I had to be on antibiotics all of the time. It did not happen over night but I eventually stopped giving myself and my family every diagnoses known to man.

The second thing I did was type in my head. In my sleep. During the day while talking to my husband. During the night while watching television. In the grocery store listening in on a conversation. I typed all of the time. I would even be typing in my dreams (of course, I had a way cooler keyboard and I could type without error and the speed would literally blow you away)! I would type in my head to see if I could type as fast as I could listen. I would type in my head to make sure I could spell most everything I listened to. I just typed all of the time. I eventually, thank heavens!, stopped doing that. Now I hardly even type when I am suppose to!!

The third thing I did was look up every single word. I did not have the advantage of schooling for this career. I started doing it as a favor to my sister-in-law who worked at a doctor's office. She would hire people, train them, and they would eventually leave for a better job. She approached me one day (I was probably complaining of no money!) and propositioned me in that if she would teach me to transcribe doctors dictation, that I would stay for a very long time and not leave her in a lurch. I was a stay-at-home mommy then (a job I hope to return to one day) with Garrick who was just 3 and Natalie who was a brand new baby. I told her I would try and we would see where it went. The first 30 minute tape I transcribed took me literally 8 hours to do. I was devastated and completely discouraged. She would come over at night and go over the work and correct some of things I had and fill in the 1000s of blanks I had. As the days turned into weeks which turned into months, I got better and better. Then I started with this compulsive need to know what I was typing. I could spell rhonchi, wheezing, and rales but I had no what they were. So, as I got faster with the typing and faster with the listening, I started looking everything up. I remember one of the first words I learned was "hepatosplenomegaly" meaning enlarged liver and spleen. Okay, so what is wrong with saying enlarged liver and spleen...I don't know, but I do know that medical words are long in letters and not as long in definition! I eventually stopped doing this because, well I got into a speciality where they pretty much type the same things over, I still have a compulsion occasionally to look something up that I have never come across, but it just does not happen very often. BTW, I can transcribe 30 minutes now in approximately an hour for one doctor and approximately an hour and 15 to 30 minutes for the other.

Okay, now to the point of the whole blog today...The fourth thing I always did was get really, really sad when a patient came in who was really sick, who was dying, who was losing a child, a mother, or a father, who was beyond repair, who waited just a little too long. I will never forget when I was typing for an ER in Farmington and this woman brought in her 3-week-old son who had expired in the car and she was distraught begging the physicians to please bring her baby boy back. I wept for that mother that day and for her son. I would be so sad for days after reading about a woman who had beat breast cancer to find out it had metastized to the brain or lungs. Or that little girl who was back in the ER after "falling down the stairs" yet again. I had to finally tell myself that I could not be emotionally involved like this. I had to learn to type patients and not people. I had to learn to type word by word and not really listen to the sentence. Anyway, I typed on that elderly gentleman today and I had remembered typing that he had no family. I went up in the report to look at the words, and indeed, he had never been married, no children, and his closest living relative was a great-neice who lives in San Jose. He had no one and he had an inoperable brain tumor. This gentleman is going to die soon and he is going to die alone. It puts everything in my life in a different perspective.