Wednesday, February 11, 2009

Just Another Day At The Office

The good news is, I got in my "afternoon nap" at 6 o'clock this morning. I reported for work (in my home office) only to find a mess of company e-mails indicating that the platform on which I work was completely futzed. I sent an instant message to my supervisor and she said, just go back to bed. Fortunately, I had not yet had my coffee, so I was able to go right back to sleep.

We're still futzed up, but we can work, sort of. We have been strongly admonished to keep a hardcopy record of everything we do today, in case none of it shows up in tomorrow's reports.

With all that in mind, imagine my amusement when my second job of the day involves a gynecological procedure performed by Dr. . . . well, I won't tell you his last name, but it is the same as that of a certain animal well-known for building dams across streams.

Now I'm in the midst of a report where the patient was brought to the emergency room after ingesting a razor blade. I just typed the following:

This is a . . . male, incarcerated in the jail. He has had multiple episodes of ingesting razor blades.

Um, excuse me, where is he getting the razor blades, and why did they not put a stop to this the first time he tried it??

Inquiring minds need to know!

UPDATE: It gets better. The doctor just dictated, "The patient probably has an underlying psychiatric issue."

Gee... ya think?


2 comments:

Dee said...

Hello Cranky,

Butterflysneeze here!
I am at a total loss of words for an explanation for this. All I can say is it takes all kinds and I guess someone isn't doing their job or perhaps it has something to do with the rights of prisoners.

As you may recall, I too am a medical transcriptionist and in the fifteen years or so I have been doing this work, some rather startling reports have crossed my fingertips too! Actually, most of us probably have some incredulous stories to tell about what we have "heard"/"typed" over the years. Especially if we have done any work for psychiatric facilities.

Anyway, I thought I was perhaps the only transcriptionist with a razor-blade swallowing patient story, (why I thought I was the only one I don't know, I really should know better by now.......amazing things happen in our world)

My story is from when I was working at a small, local hospital. On Halloween night, a female teenager was brought into the emergency room. They wound up doing an emergency upper endoscopy on her and removed several razor blades from her stomach! I never did hear the particulars of the incident and the doctor did not go into detail about the circumstances in his report. I am sure he was called into the hospital in the wee hours of the night/morning to perform the procedure and was not too happy about it and just wanted to get back home! I do not recall the patient being admitted to the psychiatric ward, and it WAS Halloween, so I concluded that she must have swallowed the razor blades accidentally. But how on earth someone can swallow several razor blades accidentally is beyond my comprehension!

Anonymous said...

LMAO! I which OB/GYN you speak of and I just have to say I *fell out of my chair* laughing the first time I got him. The poor guy. You know with a name like that he never even had a choice as to a specialty, it was practically a moral imperative that he become go into gynecology.

 
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