It is funny how you don’t give something much thought, but then
when you do take a closer look, what you thought was pretty routine was really
a lot more than that. For the most part,
I guess you could say my first MT job was nothing out of the ordinary. I learned the terminology, the formats, and
even that darn Executive typewriter did not get the best of me. I think I might have learned to work with
that typewriter a little too easily, because eventually the therapists got into
the habit of wanting me to create forms for them. History forms, initial evaluation forms,
progress forms—if there was information that could be put into a form, they
wanted it. They would give me the basic
outline, and I would create the form.
The problem was that they almost always gave me 2 or 3 pages of
information, but of course, it had to be on one page. The really fun part was that, once I had the
form figured out and the therapist approved it (after many, many trips to their
office to look it over), I had to then type it on a stencil, place the stencil
on this drum covered with ink, and run copies off that drum. If there were any typos, you had to start
from scratch. So the positive out of
that experience? I became very good at paying attention to detail.
I was pretty fortunate in that everyone had good dictating
skills. One of the occupational
therapists would often end his dictation with telling me a joke and then
thanking me for transcribing his work. The
entire staff also allowed me to edit the dictation where necessary. Well,
almost everyone. There was this one PT
guy who liked to dictate one sentence for his reports. One, very long sentence. Maybe 2 sentences if it was an initial
evaluation. It was just a constant “and,
“and, “and…” So naturally I would edit
that down into more readable sentences without all the ands. It did not take long
for him to storm into the administrator’s office demanding to know why I was
changing his dictation. Kind of ironic
this guy’s last name was Wilde. I tell you no lie; it really was Wilde. My boss called me into the office to get my
side of the story and actually agreed with my explanation, but he also said it
just might be better to go along with following Wilde’s style of dictating,
which I did of course. Now that was my
first lesson in learning how not to change the dictator’s style.
The disgruntled employee I mentioned previously turned out
to be a minor incident. When I got the
promotion to transcription coordinator, my co-worker was a tad upset she was
not offered the position. She worked
part-time for the clinic and part-time for another department, and by then we
had hired another MT because the clinic side was growing with adding on more
therapists. So I was the logical choice,
since I was in the clinic office all day, every day. When I explained that and also pointed out
this did not make me her boss, just simply the one who would call the repair
guy, order supplies, assign any stat dictations and those types of duties, she
was okay and things went back to normal.
Once again, another lesson to learn from a negative experience. I suppose I could have been nasty right back
at her and told her she had no right to lash out at me, but that would have
only resulted in bad feelings and an awkward work environment, and who needs
that? Instead, I pointed out the logistics of the situation, and once she was
able to see it made sense, we went on to have a great working
relationship.
The difficult doctor was a true test of my patience and
professionalism. He came in only once a
week to do disability exams, and he expected us to have his reports transcribed
and on his desk before he left at the end of the day. That would have been easy enough except the
guy talked so fast that none of us could get through a report without leaving a
lot of blanks and then having to decipher his scribbling once he filled them
in, and by the time we would retype the reports, he was long gone. So I decided to ask him if he would be
willing to dictate a normal exam that we could just plug into the report, and
that way he would only have to dictate the abnormal findings. Great idea, right? Saves him time and us a lot of
headaches. I approached him in the
hallway between patients and told him my idea. His response? He pinched both of my cheeks and said, “You
are so cute” and walked away. I stood
there absolutely speechless and red as a beet (so love that I was blessed with
the blush gene—NOT). Since he felt I was
so cute, I decided to be even cuter and inform him his reports would not be
done for his signature until the following week. The following week, he dictated a normal
physical exam. So I guess being cute has
its advantages.
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