Mmmmmm h8rade

Today I am full of hate for doctors who dictate while standing next to LOUD CONTINUOUS BEEPING THINGS.

BRB going nuts

Listen, MT-who-shall-remain-nameless, if you want answers to questions you'll have to make your questions less cryptic.  I'm pretty smart but I'm not psychic.  Leaving a note that says "which one" with no indication as to which one of what just makes me fantasize about ways you could be punished.

Also I'm pissed off that you didn't type all of that job earlier and then uploaded it.  

No love, 

Me.

Listen to the language scream

Okay, MTs, look.  This is your NATIVE EFFING LANGUAGE.  And you can't tell when you've just typed utter gibberish?  COME ON.  Take the time to ask yourself if what you just typed made any goddamn sense.  NO!  IT DIDN'T!  Now, are you going to worship the ignorant doctor, or recast or leave a blank or do something that shows some kind of goddamn intelligence and respect for the beautiful, wonderful tongue we call English?

Oh.  I forgot.  This is the USA.  Everyone gets a ribbon for showing up.

Why oh why...

Why do I keep getting reports with a bunch of hard returns at the end?  Do people just hold down the Enter key while giggling madly until they're led away by kind nurses and put back in the rubber room?  ARGH.

My plan

I am going to make a very high-quality digital recording of my dogs slurping up their food.  This takes them about ten minutes.  I'll do this over the course of about ten days.

Then, I will take my recording to the state where my hospitals at my second job are located, where I will kidnap and hold hostage every doctor who eats while dictating.  I will take them to one of those high-quality recording rooms at the local university, give them enough speed to keep them awake for a very long time, lock them in, and play my wonderful recording on a loop.  For 72 straight hours.

Afterward, if they complain, I'll shout at them that they're educated people and should be able to deal with a silly little thing like a recording of dogs eating, and give them more speed and lock them in again for more listening.

This will continue until they promise on pain of death that they will NEVER EVER CHEW AND SLURP AND MAKE GROSS NOISES WITH THEIR GODDAMN FOOD IN MY EAR EVER AGAIN.

CONTEXT: NOT THAT ADVANCED.

My mother, rest her soul, always told everyone, including my teachers, that I was very advanced (mostly it just made teachers think I was an insufferable little know-it-all, but she meant well). Naturally when my son (her first grandchild) came along, he was also very advanced, and she continued the trend with the rest of the grandkids to the point where at one point we decided we should all have t-shirts made that said VERY ADVANCED.

You can use what were called context clues when I was in 3rd grade to figure out which meaning of advanced I'm talking about here. That means you look how the word fits into the entire sentence or paragraph (in context) in order to figure it out; in this case I'm sure you quickly realized that my mother meant further along in mental development.

The error I keep seeing along these lines (or in this context) pertains to the term advance directive.  If we are smart and use context clues they will tell us that this term, when used in a medical report, uses the word advance to mean prior to something (in this case something medically catastrophic that leaves you unable to give or withhold consent for procedures such as CPR or ventilatory support).

Why, then, do I keep seeing it typed as advanced directive? It's not about a particularly sophisticated or complex directive, and directives in general don't have mental or physical development, and while the idea may or may not be ahead of its time, that's not what this phrase is talking about.

I have a theory, of course, and that is that people just type like monkeys, stringing words together without the slightest attention paid to context or even a general idea of whether things make sense. They're just out to get that line count and quality be damned.

You'll find that this is one of two theories I have about a lot of common MT mistakes. The other one is that some people are just stupid and should be punched in the head until they learn to do things my way right.

In any case, I plead with the MT community at large to pay attention to their context clues, and not make silly mistakes like typing advanced directive rather than advance directive, the latter being correct for reasons I've just explained above (which took several rewrites because this is an error that makes me want to kill things).

Thanks to Bee Dictionary and The Straight Dope General Questions Forum for helping me articulate all this.  :)

P.S.  I wanted to name this post Are You Experienced Advanced? but I couldn't figure out how to do strikethrough in the title.  Woe.
P.P.S.  I did learn how to use colors.  Red is bad.  Blue is good.  Purple means this is a concept you should engrave on the inside of your eyeballs.  :D

OK look people

When doc is dictating a cardiac catheterization, it is HIGHLY UNLIKELY that he is going to comment on the patient's LEFT KNEE in the middle of the angiogram.

It's a good thing I'm obsessively professional. Otherwise I would leave extremely snarky feedback and make that MT cry, because I'm a huge bitch and OH MY GOD IT IS SO OBVIOUS WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH PEOPLE.

I wish I had a glass of wine. :(

You know what I hate?

Blissfully QAing report after report, secure in the knowledge that everyone else is more ignorant than me... BAM.

Doc has dictated a drug. MT has typed a drug. The drug is spelled correctly, but my QA sense is tingling!

I'm 99% sure this is not the correct drug. For one thing, it's a cancer drug, and the patient doesn't have cancer listed under past medical history or diagnoses or anything. For another, it's smack in the middle of a list of inhalers, and the patient DOES have a history of COPD.

Unfortunately since doctors totally flunk Drug Pronunciation 101, I am unable to find what drug it is, so I have to do that thing where I replace the MT's carefully looked-up spelling and replace it with a blank.

It makes me feel fantastically lame when I do that. Every time I make a correction I ask myself what I'll say if someone comes back and questions it. In this case all I'd be able to say is, "Well, I don't know what it is, but it's not that.

Maybe I'll just start linking to this blog post in my feedback. LOL.

???

I’d like to explain to you that “???” is not a useful QA note. In fact it’s damned irritating, because I have to highlight and delete it, which adds to my keystrokes, and that, my friends, is on the order of Lex Luthor stealing 40 cakes.

You know what else is not a useful QA note? One that is so cryptic that it’s just word salad. I have one up right this very minute that reads “clicked on as saying word.” What does this mean? In what universe does it make some kind of sense? Even when I go into the report and look at the blanks that were left… I have no idea. Perhaps we should get Encyclopedia Brown on the case, because me, I’m on the clue-free bus.

Another one that I hate is one like this: “Cannot understand, could not find this.” REALLY? I thought you just left those blanks in there for fun. Never occurred to me that it might have been because you couldn’t understand them. Thank goodness you thought to leave a note about it, or I’d be really confused.

I sometimes wonder if these MTs were traumatized by cruel, vicious, tyrannical QAs who stood over them with cat o’ nines, demanding that they justify EVERY BLANK EVER with a note. I picture them looking around furtively as they type these notes, tears flowing from their eyes as they type in whatever nonsense is coming my way.

What a tragic image. I must remember to send a card.

The point of all this is that useless QA notes cost you and me money. You expend keystrokes typing them in, I expend keystrokes deleting them; how about if we all agree that QA notes should be coherent, to the point, and not blindingly obvious? This way, we both make more money, and also my rhythm is not disrupted and I remain a fairly well-adjusted person, as opposed to the screaming banshee I become when my rhythm is disrupted.