Notes from the office

It’s been a rough week. 

This week at work a legal matter had me involved in a zoom-interview that was part deposition and part disquisition but mostly felt ‘inquisition’. I suppose I shouldn’t say more about it so I won’t.  It’s been a major source of stress for me, a matter for months, and apparently ‘not over’.   

At home I have some sniffles and aches, which is probably allergies or a mild cold, but of course I am wondering if I picked up covid19 on my travels. I need to be tested. I always ask my patients ‘Did you have any medical matters since I last spoke with you?”; in the past four weeks I’ve heard more reports of covid19 than in the past six months.  AZ resembles 1347 Florence. 

There is one ‘positive” at work: my work EMR (electronic medical record) has a dashboard that tells me how many unsigned documents I have. It feels good to get this down to ‘zero”. For many months it thumbs its proverbial nose at me taunting me I have ‘one” to sign – with no evidence there is any.  The inability to get to ‘zero” was driving me to distraction, enough to call the help line on the matter. They were most empathetic and after some detective work we found the culprit. Last summer I wrote a telephone note on a patient of The Other Doctor. I sent it to him. He left the practice and didn’t ‘sign off”. To remedy this sore, I had to get the house manager to resurrect him from the dead as an active staff member, then I impersonated him to go in and sign the damn thing. Hot puppies! this worked!  Unfortunately by becoming The Other Doctor (even for five minutes) this resulted in me becoming inactive and worse – nonexistent. It was very ‘1984’.  Eventually I was resurrected ala Dungeons and Dragons and I am back in the saddle with a dashboard showing ‘zero’ for unsigned charts.

One gets ones jollies where one can.