Refreshed, mostly

Since I have yet to resolve my formatting issues, I’m going to bullet my paragraphs as it seems to magically space them out much better.

• Had a good weekend with a spontaneous day of shopping on Saturday with a good friend that was much needed for my mental health I think. And productive too – I bought ALL of my Christmas gifts. In fact, I was so loaded down with purchases in one store that the woman at the checkout left a line of people waiting to fend for themselves while she hunted down a shopping basket for me that she had offered before I even asked for one. Impressive customer service for me – I obviously had the look of a VIP about to fork over fistfuls of cash which made me more worthy of serving over the people about to buy only a newspaper. Anyway, they were rewarded for their efforts shortly thereafter when I spent a good portion of my monthly rent cheque on gifts. Good gifts though. Ones that I hope the recipients like as much as I do. J I even ended up buying a few gifts for people I didn’t intend to buy for this year. I guess I got swept up in the moment (or couple of hours anyway).
• I also made the effort to go to a craft fair and pick up tea from my tea lady. I realized the other day that I may not have told you about my wonderful new arrangement. There was a woman with a tea store downtown that I stumbled into the week before it shut its doors. The owner has subsequently gone on to sell tea from her home but lives a 45 min drive out of town. So we’ve worked out the best arrangement ever (for me that is). I order my tea from her via email, leave her an envelope of cash in my mailbasket and she leaves me a bag with my tea in it in my porch. It’s really quite fantastic. This month when I got the email that she was going to be at a fair trade craft fair this weekend and that any tea orders over $25 would be rewarded with a free gift I made sure I got off my butt & did my part to help her out (and get a free gift – of more tea no less). Nice craft fair too. Very Victoria.
• I thought I had been doing well relaxing this weekend and recuperating after my demanding month, when I woke up this morning to a coldsore on my lip. I know that coldsores are my body’s early warning system that I am run down – so I took heed, did minimal talking to anyone and had a relaxing & productive day. Hopefully I’ll be back in good working order shortly.

• As for hospital goings-on, one of the things that astounds me is the absolute LACK of technology being used for patient records. Sure there’s a system to see lab values and xrays/images on the computer, but for the most part, all of the text that goes into a patients file is done by HAND. How archaic to still have problems of handwriting legibility causing medication errors. And to be trying to decipher some other doctor’s recommendations from their tiny chicken scratch. On top of it all, at the end of a patient’s stay in hospital we have to do a discharge summary. This summary is, get this, dictated. By phone. How 1970’s to have to learn to pick up a special dictating phone, press the “record” button and say things like:

Patient Name,colon, new paragraph, John Smith, new paragraph, Provinicial health card number, colon, new paragraph, 1234567890, new paragraph.

You get the gist. What is up with that?? You don’t get a chance to even read what it is you dictated. It just goes into the abyss that is the transcription office to be typed up no doubt by woman with a fancy hairdo and long nails that click like Mrs. Wiggins from the Carol Burnett show. Not that I’m making fun of them specifically, I’m just astounded at how old-school the whole process still is. Very strange, especially when I’m coming from a program with video-conferenced lectures for the last 2 years.

Anyway that’s all for now, starting oncology tomorrow for the next 2 weeks. We’ll see how that goes.