complete my Medical Transcriptionist correspondence course

DONE. I put them in the mail on Sunday before we left, to be mailed on Monday, so they are gone now. I hope I got the address correct, because they didn’t really say where to mail them, just “to the school.” I contacted the school but because it was a weekend, no one was there to tell me where to mail them. Should I REALLY have to go on a quest just to find where to mail my transcripts? They could have provided me an address in the book, or when I logged into my student account. But no. That would have made sense!

I wouldn’t be exactly surprised if I fail this round… What a three ring circus just to figure out how these transcripts were supposed to look. I’m very confident on the medical terminology and I realize now there was definitely one grammar mistake, but the most headache I got was trying to figure out how the transcripts are supposed to look. I could feel myself just shaking my head and going “Oh well. If you fail, you fail. You could spend forever flipping back and forth between all these pages in the vain hope that this will eventually make sense. Just print them, get them gone, and know you did your best.”

If I got the address correct, it should take about a month before my results come back, so we’ll see. Then I have another ten transcripts and if I don’t fail all those… I will have completed this. But that is if. Here’s hoping. (:

to three very wonderful people here on 43things. I’m ‘back in the saddle’ coz of you.

THANK YOU to TriniPrincess for giving me the kick I need to get moving. THANK YOU! You are so right. “Just start.”

THANK YOU to CreativeHeart for being so relentless in pursuit of your goals. Granted, it exhausts me looking at what you accomplish… but if you can do it, I can certainly do a little bit, right? So thank you for being that inspiration.

And THANK YOU, of course, to New Isabella, for being the biggest anti-procrastinator that I know of on here. With all of your “frog eating”, I can jump in too, and snarf down a frog of my own. Thank you for that support.

I have been typing out my reports for the past little bit and I now have pericardial rub and intertrochanteric femoral fracture stuck in my head. I laid down to nurse Shawn earlier and I was repeating all of the glossary case words to myself:

“Myocardial infarction. Vastus lateralis. Buck’s traction. Rhonchus. Klebsiella pneumoniae. Subcutaneous…”

I figure it’s good reinforcement.

You know the hardest part of getting this finished isn’t learning how to spell ‘normocephalic’ or ‘organomegaly’ – no, it’s decoding how they want these reports formatted!

I was sent two separate work books, plus a school book. The school book has guidelines on how to set the reports up to look good, but the work books have additional caveats on what to change from the school book layouts. And they can’t do it to make sense, either. Nooooo. It’s so confusing I don’t even know how to explain it other than it involved several open books before me at the computer, comparing examples, italic instructions, and directions in the school book to figure out. I still don’t think I’ve done it entirely correctly.

And there are glossaries everywhere! I understand that as I go through cases I am expected to know the words I learned in the previous cases… but why is there a third glossary in the back of my work book – not in alphabetical order at that – with a smattering of words I can’t find anywhere else in my school book? For example, I encountered “keratotic” in the second case… but it’s not in the glossary for that case! Weird.

Anyway… once I got going I found myself enjoying it. This is the last leg of my course and I feel it has been put together well up until now. I mean, isn’t the whole point of this course for me to learn medical transcription and not to memorize which pages my report layout instructions are on?

Whatever, lol. I’m picking away at it, and I’ll get it done yet.

I haven’t wrote anything about this until now… just coz. I have kind of flew through so far, and to be honest now that I only have 20 reports to transcribe, I’ve hit a hiccup.

I’ve got great grades – a 93% I think – and a 92% is considered highest honors. Except for the very boring law text book, I’ve found the vast majority of my schoolwork to be easily understood and I enjoy it.

But… I’ve kind of wimped out now. I started end of January, they had a shipment on queue for a month and after that it was all pretty steady. I’m so close to being finished, but I’m just finding it so hard to keep going. I haven’t even downloaded my reports I’m to transcribe!

It’s kind of funny too, because this isn’t exactly the career I dreamed about when I was little, like “Oh boy I sure want to grow up and type medical diction! I can hardly wait!” but I think a part of me never WAS going to choose a career, either. I’ve considered about 25-30 different careers, some serious, some not, but this is the one that I settled on. I like that it IS in the medical industry, and these days that is basically a guaranteed good job. I like that it could lead me into being a nurse one day, and I like especially that I can work from home.

Once I’m over the tired stage of Baby’s first few weeks of pregnancy, I’ll be able to focus again on this. I am given two years from my last January plus the month that my books were backordered to complete my course, so I am very confident I will have all of this done in time. I just would have liked it done by now! lol