sense of hearing

listen up. this is what i do for a living. i sit at a computer and i wear headphones. i listen to doctors dictate medical reports and i type what they say, within reason. it's a pretty sweet gig, especially after years upon years of retail customer service. i'm still a total freak for books, but i do not for a minute miss the book retail industry. (well, maybe just for a minute.) it's wonderful to not have to talk to people, especially the general public. yeesh.

emergency room visits are sometimes the most interesting reports to transcribe but too often they're dull. i must have transcribed 5 reports of children with otitis media today, and another 5 kids had upper respiratory infections. it can get old. although, a couple weeks ago i typed up two reports in as many days of young men who do heavy industrial work and who dropped heavy drills on a foot and essentially destroyed it. phrases like "crush injury," "traumatic amputation," and "hanging by a tendon" and words like "avulsed" and "degloved" are spoken into my ears and my stomach churns and i quiver with a macabre glee.

it was odd that two people had the same terrible thing happen to them, and odd too that i got both reports to type. im' not the only transcriptionist working there, and what reports i get is the luck of the draw.

apparently, the human body can take only so much. i could not at all cope with working in the actual emergency department and see these things with my own eyes. i would never stop throwing up. and i would be endlessly annoyed by people who come to the er with something as banal as a sore throat. it's bad enough having to type those wastrels' reports without having to interact with them. i've had it up to here with interaction.

i like doing discharge summaries, because i get to see the entire picture of a patient's visit in the hospital. death summaries do produce a strange thrill. echocardiograms are quick and easy. but surgeries are my favorite. orthopedic surgeries are interesting but challenging because a lot of instrumentation is used and sometimes it's hard to find the names of all the pins and plates and screws and whatnot. sometimes i like doing an eye surgery, like the repair of a detached retina.

abdominal and thoracic surgeries are the best. c-sections, appendectomies, hiatal hernia repairs. i think i like them because i feel like i can visualize well what's going on. today i typed up a breast reconstruction report. (plastic surgeries are fun too.) the patient in question had breast cancer and was status post a partial mastectomy. there was a term the surgeon used with which i was unfamiliar (that never happens - just kidding!) and i used the internet to see what i could learn. the term had to do with a type of flap graft.

another perk of the job is that not at all infrequently i accidentally come across a website that wasn't even at all what i was looking for but is fascinating or horrific and worth pursuing later. i love learning this stuff. anyway, i found out about the type of graft and i went on with my typing.

a big part of my job is editing. this aspect will only grow as voice-recognition software, now in its infancy, well, grows up. i don't really mind that, i don't think. i like editing. of course, physicians aren't necessarily terribly knowledgable about grammar. they are frequently redundant. they frequently contradict themselves. it's up to me to make sense of the gibberish coming out of their mouths and produce an intelligible medical report.

i'm not even going to talk about the challenge of mumblers and fast talkers. yeesh.