Thursday, May 13, 2010

In Which I Clean Up My Act

During the semester, my apartment (flat, for any Brits) often appears as if a small tactical nuke has detonated in the center. It's never DIRTY, but stacks of papers pile up, especially patient records that I keep so I can shred them properly. So now, with my parents coming into town tomorrow for "graduation" (I dont ACTUALLY graduate until August 2) I find myself having to dig through 3 months of accumulated debris...some of it hilarious.

Case 1. Patient notes I took on a post-partum patient before I actually knew what half of the abbreviated words MEANT. Therefore, there are statements like "she was induced for postdate and she's a TPAL 1122" with notations like "post what?" and "what does TPAL mean? How many kids is that?" Now i know that "postdate" means the docs started her labor because she was after her due date and hadn't given birth. TPAL is a way of noting Term (t) Preterm (p) Abortions (misscarriages or therapeutic) (a) and Live children (L). Sometimes, as I learned, the numbers DONT add up, then you have to go in and ask the patient to repeat HOW many children she has, how many times she's been pregnant, et cet. Very odd.

So now, as I move on to Home Health (shudder) and Health Promotion (postpartum unit, as it turns out) I realise just how much I learned in the past few months. Woah.

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