Week of October 29, 2001
Monday
Tuesday Wednesday
Thursday Friday
Saturday Sunday
Most Recent Update
Another manic Monday! Busy all day seeing patients from age two months to mid 80's. The two month old was a well baby check and immunizations and the 84 year old was to refill his high blood pressure medication. In between were people with colds and back pain and other assorted diagnoses. Also, at noon, was an interview of a candidate for a position with our group. She is a family physician who is currently in the Navy but getting out soon and looking for a position here in the Pacific Northwest. She is just finishing up two years of duty on a ship and wants to move someplace where she can settle down and not move again for a number of years. Her minimum would be five years which sounds good to me. One of the problems with a rapidly growing group is that there is some turnover when people decide they made the wrong decision and don't really want to be a part of a large multispecialty group. We are trying to find people who want to really put down roots in this community so up front we tell them that. That attitude has probably cost us a few good candidates but we will find the kind of people we are looking for in the long run.
Lots of paperwork to do as well. The increased volume of paperwork for a medical practice is what drives us really crazy. Most of it we are expected to do by outside agencies or insurance companies at no reimbursement for the time we spend doing it. This extra time I spend doing it really impacts on my ability to be able to leave the office at a reasonable hour. I resent being asked to do more and more for less and less. It seems that each company has their own form that has to be a little different from the one used by a similar company. And, the social service agency of state government and the various agencies of the federal government all spend a lot of time devising new and more complex forms that they want us to fill out without being compensated for our time above and beyond direct care of the patient. The government agencies all plead that there is no money in their budget to compensate us for our time. Enough now, I have blown off enough steam for tonight.
I also finished benefit enrollment online for the coming year today. I am purchasing more life insurance next year to be sure my family is taken care of if something should happen to me. Not because I am afraid of terrorism but the older I get the more I realize what could happen to my family if I were to die suddenly like people I see every day do. Some of them really leave their families unprepared, I am trying to NOT leave them unprepared. Being a saved Christian I am not afraid of death as there is a much better life awaiting me. On the other hand, I do not think I have accomplished all that I was put here on earth to accomplish so I hope to get some more time to do that.
I have downloaded and installed the latest edition of the US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases' Medical Management of Biological Casualties Handbook on my office PC, my home PC, and my iPaq. For the iPaq I am using the new Adobe Acrobat Reader for the Pocket PC (beta) which is working great so far. I now feel more confident in knowing how to deal with treating some diseases that I would not have thought about needing to know how to treat until 9/11/01 of this year. Hopefully I will not have to use any of this material.
Busy day again at the office. Very busy in the morning but, thankfully, I had no one to see in the hospital. Our service is still down at the hospital but the office is very busy. Usually, when it is busy in one area it is busy in both areas. I don't know why it is different right now. Lots of upper respiratory infections out there right now. The viruses seem to have become very active very suddenly. No influenza yet, it's a little early here yet for that.
I don't work in the office again until Friday as tomorrow is my regular day off then I have a meeting at corporation headquarters in Bellevue on Thursday. Tomorrow I have to take my car in for routine service and check on Stephen at the orthodontist's where he is getting his braces put on. His mouth is already sore from just the spacers. He is convinced that all he will be able to eat is liquid food for the foreseeable future. He doesn't believe that his mouth will get less sore as he gets used to the braces.
The NBA regular season began tonight. Delanae and I watched the first half of the Blazers-Lakers game then I had to get on the cross country ski machine to exercise. The Lakers look like they are taking up where they left off last season after winning the NBA championship for two years in a row. The Blazers have some work to do to be able to compete with the Lakers this year but this is a long season and anything can happen before it is over.
I slept in a little this morning as I had no one to see in the hospital this morning and it is my day off. Of course I had to get up to make sure the kids were up and getting out the door on time. Stephen went in late today as he had the orthodontic appointment after his first period. That took about 90 minutes and he now has all his braces on. The orthodontist talked to him about how his pain will lessen within a week and then he will just have a sore mouth for a day after each adjustment.
I did go into the office for a little while today. I worked on an agenda for a committee meeting Friday and checked my e-mail. While there I found out that I will have a patient in the hospital when I return for rounds on Friday. He had a heart attack last night but is doing well today. My partner is taking very good care of him. I finished up the agenda at home on my home computer after I got home this afternoon.
I had lunch, actually I bought lunch, with a local physical therapist. He and I had a friendly wager on the football game between my son's high school team and one of the other high school teams in town that he helps out with their medical needs. I lost, obviously, so today was payback time. He is from near Syracuse, NY originally so we talked about Big East football and basketball for a change of pace.
Tomorrow morning I am heading for Bellevue at about 5:45 AM. I am riding with someone else this time but it will still be a long trip up there and back. Hopefully the meeting will be worth it. Hopefully I will be posting again tomorrow night but no promises.
Long day today! I was late getting to the house where I was meeting the person I was riding with up to Bellevue this morning because their house was hidden in the fog. They live above us on our hill and that part of the hill gets fog a lot. It was very thick this morning so nothing looked like it did the other time I drove there. I did not have written directions this time so was relying on my memory and visual cues which weren't there this morning(the visual cues not the memory). I had to double back a couple of times before I finally turned on the right road and found the house. We were about fifteen minutes late getting started but made it to the meeting right on time.
Traffic was predictable horrible in the Seattle area. Since there was two of us in the car we could use the car pool lane which was at least moving. The other lanes were all stop and go from Tacoma northward which is almost thirty miles. It is like that every day in the Seattle area. I don't know how the commuters handle that every day. Once in a while is way too much for me.
The meeting was interesting although not real exciting. I won't bore you with details but suffice it to say that the committee which met today, by doing the work assigned will put our healthcare organization in the top 1% of healthcare organizations in the future as far as being prepared for healthcare legislation. I think that once we finish our work over the next two years some members of this committee will be asked to be consultants to other organizations to help them do the same work we will have already done. I am not a real working member of this committee, I am more of a clinical consultant but our organization will be marketing the expertise and products of this committee in the future and I will be happy to say I told you so here first.
Uneventful drive home then Delanae and I were supposed to meet a couple at a local restaurant for dinner tonight. About twenty minutes before we were supposed to leave our next door neighbors called to say that their teenaged son had taken some pills and crystal meth saying he wanted to kill himself. They were taking him to the hospital and needed someone to watch their other three children. Lousy timing but what else could we do but call and cancel our plans and stay at home with Stacey and the other kids. I did get some work done tonight that I did not think I would get to until next week so something productive did come out of tonight. Also, I should get to bed earlier so I can get some rest before call this weekend.
ON CALL!
No update.
Maybe I will have time to do an update before I get called away. I have been busy this weekend on call and in the clinic. Friday night I admitted six patients throughout the night which meant I got very little sleep. Then, I had to get up Saturday morning and go make rounds and then spend all day in the clinic. It was a long day and I was looking forward to going home and getting to bed early but....
Arkansas was playing Ole Miss and it was on television. It started while I was in the office so I was taping it. I got home and risked turning it on live and saw it was 17-17 near the end of the fourth quarter. So, I just continued to watch it and SEVEN overtimes later the Hogs had won 58-56 at Ole Miss where they had not won in a lot of years. I was exhausted by the end of it, just from the tension. I cannot imagine what the players were feeling, how they kept going through it all. I was also so pumped up that I had to go back and watch all the taped game that I had missed. So, I did not get to bed early like I had planned.
Arkansas has now completely turned it around from the start of the season when they were 1-3 and looking like they were not in the race for a bowl game. They have now won four in a row, three against teams ranked in the top twenty and one of those on the road. They are primed to make a big run at a New Year's Day bowl game and most of their leaders are freshmen and sophomores. They should be even better next year with more experience. The future looks very promising for the Arkansas football program.
The Arkansas basketball program also appears to be on the way back. Nolan Richardson is beginning to get better talent again, kids who can play his style of basketball. Of course I am saying this without having seen them play at all since last year. They should be on television enough this year that I will catch a few of their games. I look for them to surprise some people in the SEC and on the national scene. Nolan has very good junior and senior guards which he likes.
Tomorrow I am working the morning in the office. Ordinarily I would have Monday off after working the weekend but I have a Leadership Council meeting in the morning that I need to go to so I thought I would work part of the day since I was going to be there anyway. Tomorrow afternoon I will try and get some rest.
