Clinic Notes - How on Earth did I get through it?

Working my way through Clinic Notes, I felt panicky and nervous. Staying motivated was a huge effort. Let's just say I wasn't always successful and leave it there.

All right, I won't just leave it there. This is supposed to be about my student journey and I need to be open and honest. It was so hard to listen to the dictations and think that I could possibly get good at this! Every report that had word swallowers, mumblers, speed talkers, and just general poor audio quality made it feel like I was trying to walk through hip-deep thick mud! I would get through one of these awful reports, hit the submit, get the comparison, and want to hit my computer with a baseball bat! Then, I'd quit working for the day.

So much for doing one report after the next. (Sigh) I felt defeated. But even more than that, I was pissed off! Not at the school. Not at the material I was trying to learn. I was mad at myself! How could I be so dumb? How could I not hear that slurred bit of dictation? Didn't I see that medical term three reports ago? How'd I miss that?

Getting through high school with As and Bs didn't prepare me for trying to get through these dictations and the inevitable failures. I never failed to learn what was placed in front of me! How could this be happening?

I went back through "How to Have a Beautiful Gradebook." Thank you Jill. I went through the Transcription Consultation video. Thank you Jill. I went through the forum. Thank you students and staff! I managed to hold on to my ability to click "NEXT" and attempt the next report. Barely.

During the middle of Clinic Notes, I was also given the horrible financial news that I was going to lose my Social Security, that my Mom was getting more and more ill, and my children were being completely and insanely irresponsible. I was fighting with my brother. I was in pain from injuries, old and new. I was just about ready to jump into the psychiatric ward at the hospital with my poor mangled brain in my hands. Slowly, this horrible period of my life started to calm and the hospital stay was receding from immediate possibility! How? The first part was getting back on medication. (Insert shrugging here.) Sometimes, you grab whatever life preserver you can. Then it was the forum. My friends in Keep On Keepin' On welcomed me every time I posted and helped me to stay encouraging and encouraged me to keep moving forward.

The more I encouraged others, the better I felt. The more positive feedback I got, the easier it was to believe it. Anyone who reads my posts on the forum can probably see that I'm just trying to lift others and keep them going. Supporting them, when they can't support themselves completely, helps to remind myself that I'm not the only one who's got problems, struggles, or needs support!

It's true that helping others can provide relief to yourself. This, apparently, is true of me as well. Who knew that Career Step provided therapy?

Working Through the Report

 The very first thing is always the hardest part. Deciding to stop putting it off. You've got work to do. A goal to reach. Get off your duff and get to work! At least that's what I have to tell myself when my family has thrown me a few curve balls in too rapid of succession and I really don't feel up to it.

After making the decision to put my fingers to the task, I try to make sure my desk is cleared off and set up to be most efficient for me. I have my coffee or soda, my hardcopy references like my medical dictionary, English dictionary, thesaurus, Pill Book, Gray's Anatomy, Stedman's books, notebook, binder, pen, and phone on top of my desk. I also have my reading glasses for that stupid tiny print they use in most of these books. I'm thankful every day for Ctr + and - to adjust the size of the letters on my screen. I love reading. I don't love glasses. Go figure.

With BenchmarkKB, Career Step, and Gmail tabs open and Shorthand primed and ready, with my trusty noise-canceling headphones I am ready to listen to dictations. Or am I? Nope. I have 2 browsers open at all times. I may never need the second one, but sometimes I need to open the same page in different browsers for research. Many times I have Career Step open in the second browser so I can research the information in the course. I often use my own saved copies of previous reports in Word to research as well. Like when I can't for the life of me remember how to format an Ophthalmology report. Please save me from that beasty!

I usually use a modified 3 pass method for transcribing, just like what they tell you to do in the Transcription Consultation. First pass is for listening and transcribing what I hear easily. I generally need to change the speed of the dictation because I just don't type fast enough straight, and I'm not good enough to keep up (yet) with Shorthand. If there's a word I know but can't seem to spell, I plug it into Benchmark, Google, or The Free Dictionary. Usually that's enough to find what I'm looking for and type it correctly in it's place.

The Second pass is for plugging the holes. Usually it's a medication, dosage, laboratory value, and (thank you doctor mumble/speed talker) vital signs. It would be so much nicer if the numbers that actually affect patient care were clearly spoken. Don't you think? This is also when I listen over and over to those hard to hear sections of bad audio, cut off words, slang, abbreviations, diagnoses or tests that doctors also like to mangle into unrecognizable mush. I take this time to proofread the document and see if there's anything else that I can fix. Then I hit submit.

I add up my errors and put that into the points to deduct. When it tells me what percentage I scored, I take the whole report from the report number to the last of the footnotes and put it into a new Word document.

The Third pass is for retyping the report while listening to the dictation and keeping an eyeball on the comparison over there on my open Word document. How pretty it looks sitting over there with all those patriotic colors! So distracting. My new report looks good. I've proofread it for typos, run the spellchecker, and bravely hit the submit button again. If it's a clean report, I input 0 points to deduct and copy and paste the whole thing to my Word document again. With the lovely little 100% showing that I've put in the time, effort, research, and work to make the best report I could.

I save the whole thing, both versions of my report, under the report number, the module, type and specialty. You might be wondering why I don't just keep the finished report and get rid of the first one. Because I NEED to see where I had problems in the report. I can't see what I need to work on if I don't have the comparison report with the colors.

I love the searchability of Word. When I need to look up a type of report I can find it. If I have a doctor that is just beating my brain, I can search for other report numbers closest to the one I'm working on. Nine times out of 10 I'll find a report by the same doctor and can look at what he did with the last one.

I think the biggest problem that students have is panicking when the first submission comes back and they've missed things they think were right, or the comparison shows a style difference they didn't think was there. I've developed a little bit of a Zen attitude toward the comparison. I've done everything I possibly can to get a good report. Is there an error? Maybe. Is there a style difference? Probably. Am I learning from it? ABSOLUTELY!

Should I feel defeated because I don't know everything about this report, dictator, or specialty? No. Should I feel like I will never "get it" just because I didn't this time? No. I'm still learning. Mistakes, Homer-like D'oh! moments, and style issues don't have the power to overwhelm me. I take a break. Go play around, ruffle the dogs, do the dishes, visit the forum, and come back ready to tackle the next challenge.

If life was that simple and straight forward, I'd have it made!