First Week Drama

It's been a crazy week. So I guess I'll tell you about it! LOL

I finished BAC, started 6 Week Body Makeover, started with the college choir for the new semester, got a nasty cold, and started AAC. Hmm. Doesn't sound like much.

My cold is now in retreat, but for several days, it felt like the weight of a geiser getting set to go off inside my head. I'm so grateful we live in the age of cold medicine. We may not be able to "get rid" of a cold, but we can sure treat the symptoms!

Boring you with BAC isn't necessary because I already did that! Hehehe! Today, my cold finally allowed me to hear and concentrate well enough that I started on Advanced Acute Care reports. Just the instructions for unit A was an eye opener! So many details and instructions to remember and incorporate. I just hope that I can remember them all and do them right.

During the time that my cold was in high gear, I kept up with the forum and tried to maintain an upbeat and encouraging demeanor. I think I succeeded for the most part, even as I sneezed and coughed my way through the posts. Thank God my sense of humor remained intact!

Then, I added the forum for the 6 Week Body Makeover. That was an exercise in frustration to start with. They were having technical difficulties I didn't know about. After several days, I'm becoming familiar with it and getting to know the people there. I love wandering around the threads. I feel like an eavesdropper right now though because I'm not posting very often. I am getting to know everyone and where everything is.

I am learning a lot from the comments and advice given by others on the forum. That's what it's there for, and the encouragement I've received has already made me feel welcome. I'm learning about food and what portions and combinations make the best results when trying to lose.

Let's just say that eating 5 to 6 times a day is NOT easy. That breaks down to a small meal of, for me, carb and protein every 2-1/2 to 3 hours. Preparing meals in advance becomes pretty crucial in making sure that the 3 hour window isn't exceeded. I'm used to eating carbs. I mean bread, cereal, snack food. It's all carbs. Eating only a couple times a day is what I'm used to. This is a HUGE change for me.

I'm a lazy chef. Pull it from the cupboard, throw it in the microwave, and I'm a happy girl 1-1/2 minutes later. Not anymore! Without having pre-made meals ready, I figured out that I'm spending close to 3 hours just making all the meals I'm supposed to eat. No thanks! Cook it, freeze it, nuke it, eat it!

I also started swimming laps and toning exercises this week. Also not so much fun when your head wants to burst, but I did it. I only went to the pool once because I didn't want to get anyone there sick. It seems that 90% of the people that show up for "exercise" at the pool are of the blue-rinse brigade. I've got no problem mingling with geriatrics. I do have an issue with sending them to the hospital with pneumonia! Now wasn't that kind of me?

The recommended exercise for the program is walking with a target heart rate being maintained for 60 minutes. I'm nowhere near a point where my joints will tolerate the pounding this would entail. Nor do my lungs appreciate the extra effort. However, I am going to use the pool to swim laps. I had fun doing so and am ready to return with all engines burning! I've also picked up a couple of LOW impact aerobics DVDs to help me at home if I can't get to the pool. Walking will happen after I get some of this weight off. I do not plan on hurting myself. I'm a wimp and tend to just lie around the house moaning and complaining when injured. Nope, not happening!

Every weight loss plan out there pushes water. This one actually tells you why. It's not just that your muscles and cells are made up of water and function better when hydrated. Nope, that's not it. When you starve your cells of its nutrients they grab hold and RETAIN them for as long as they can. That's why people talk about water retention and weight gain. If you're NOT eating good food and drinking a lot of water then your cells become convinced they're in starvation mode and won't let go of them. When you feed them often and hydrate them well, the cells just sigh and think they've hit the jackpot!

Water also is how waste is eliminated. Duh! Right? Well, your kidneys function to remove the waste produced through metabolizing food. If your kidneys aren't flushing regularly then the liver has to take over the work, putting strain on both and setting yourself up for all sorts of unpleasant aches and illness and infections. I'm drinking over 100 ounces of water a day. Six 8 ounce glasses? Puhleeze! Needless to say, the bathroom and I are getting more acquainted, but they keep telling me this too will pass. Is that a pun?

Anyway, I'm already down 10 pounds and 10-1/2 inches. I have more energy and my left kidney no longer hurts. All this while dealing with a cold. I'm liking where this is headed!

To add a little icing to my cake, so to speak, I also started back with LCSC Concert Choir. It's a college-based choir where the community is welcome to come and rehearse and be part of everything. It's semester oriented so all breaks coincide with the school. I was part of it last semester and really enjoyed getting to know people while singing. The choir meets for 2 hours on Tuesday evenings. We met last Tuesday, were given 8 songs and told 4 of them were being performed THIS Monday. No, that's not a typo! Four songs in a week, with a performance. Outside performance no less. There were quite a few questions to the director, asking if he was serious, crazy, or just plain deluded. None the less, tomorrow we perform in front of people after practicing 4 songs a total of 2 hours.

Now I KNOW I'm an optimist! LOL

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!