Remember Me?
I'm going to dredge this Blog up again, as though it was some kind of literate zombie, and I was an idiot with a book of incantations and a very poor knowledge of Horror Movies. There are an awful lot of reasons why I haven't blogged in the last six months- some of them horribly angsty, so it's a good thing I can't remember what they were- but largely because nothing very interesting happened. It was half a year in the prime of my life, which is a bit unsettling. I don't want to reach fifty and end up looking back wistfully at "the times where I used to sit around", or, worse, "the time where I had legs". That wouldn't be good at all.
Still, when I wasn't frittering away precious weeks of my life staring at walls, one or two things did manage to happen to me. I won a short story contest (you can read it here, although I'd advise against it if you're religious, French, or have political opinions that are relatively advanced, as opposed to stupid), saw several movies I didn't understand, and summarised medical files.
Summarising medical files I did a lot, because it was my job, but didn't do as much as I could have, because it was sheer agonising torture after a while. When it's still new, it's fantastic. You get to read pretty much every meeting between a patient and their doctors that they had in their lives, and pick out the parts that matter while ignoring the bits where the doctor envisioned numerous warts slowly erupting over their charge's face while explaining for the fourteenth time that day that no, antibiotics do not, in fact, work on colds. It's strange, and kind of cool, to see someone slowly growing older as you flick through the letters, as concerns about the size of a nose give way to hideous sexual diseases give way to abortions. There are a great many stories I can't tell from the files, some of them facinating, some of them heart-rendingly tragic. After a while, you begin to feel the pain of everyone whose file you see (except the people who never have to go to the doctor, the lucky bastards), and begin to realise that pretty much everybody has horrible secret problems, problems which they can't talk about because they're terrifying, and so don't realise that everybody else has them, too. There were a lot of people who were depressed in there. I wonder if doing my job for a day could have helped, or made things worse. But then all you can really do in the end is forget, except for the things that you never can, and never should.
After a longer while, though, the job really sucked. Eventually doing the same thing over and over again can become unbearable, and when the thing in question is leaning over a desk three sizes too small for you in a seat that won't adjust that's slowly crushing all your interior organs, while reading the words "He was in hideous, hideous pain" repeat themselves over and over again, that point arrives depressingly quickly. Now I have nothing interesting to say about my work at all except that the Scottish NHS readcode systems, that put all the significant information from medical files into a computer database in an encrypted form, have codes for "Injury caused by tropical venemous millipede on farm", "Injury due to scalding chocolate" and "War injury: Crushed by falling plane", but no code for "Hepatitis A". Our tax pounds at work, there.
That's all, really, barring brief interludes where I tried to conduct an experiment on horse grazing which backfired when a horse ate all my data, went to London on a protest and protested in the wrong place by mistake, and passed part of a University course by drawing cartoons of rabbits. Not the most interesting of half years, I'll grant. But then the slim medical files are the dull ones, and the ones you become most jealous of, so, at least in a way, "not interesting" is perhaps a very positive thing indeed.
Still, when I wasn't frittering away precious weeks of my life staring at walls, one or two things did manage to happen to me. I won a short story contest (you can read it here, although I'd advise against it if you're religious, French, or have political opinions that are relatively advanced, as opposed to stupid), saw several movies I didn't understand, and summarised medical files.
Summarising medical files I did a lot, because it was my job, but didn't do as much as I could have, because it was sheer agonising torture after a while. When it's still new, it's fantastic. You get to read pretty much every meeting between a patient and their doctors that they had in their lives, and pick out the parts that matter while ignoring the bits where the doctor envisioned numerous warts slowly erupting over their charge's face while explaining for the fourteenth time that day that no, antibiotics do not, in fact, work on colds. It's strange, and kind of cool, to see someone slowly growing older as you flick through the letters, as concerns about the size of a nose give way to hideous sexual diseases give way to abortions. There are a great many stories I can't tell from the files, some of them facinating, some of them heart-rendingly tragic. After a while, you begin to feel the pain of everyone whose file you see (except the people who never have to go to the doctor, the lucky bastards), and begin to realise that pretty much everybody has horrible secret problems, problems which they can't talk about because they're terrifying, and so don't realise that everybody else has them, too. There were a lot of people who were depressed in there. I wonder if doing my job for a day could have helped, or made things worse. But then all you can really do in the end is forget, except for the things that you never can, and never should.
After a longer while, though, the job really sucked. Eventually doing the same thing over and over again can become unbearable, and when the thing in question is leaning over a desk three sizes too small for you in a seat that won't adjust that's slowly crushing all your interior organs, while reading the words "He was in hideous, hideous pain" repeat themselves over and over again, that point arrives depressingly quickly. Now I have nothing interesting to say about my work at all except that the Scottish NHS readcode systems, that put all the significant information from medical files into a computer database in an encrypted form, have codes for "Injury caused by tropical venemous millipede on farm", "Injury due to scalding chocolate" and "War injury: Crushed by falling plane", but no code for "Hepatitis A". Our tax pounds at work, there.
That's all, really, barring brief interludes where I tried to conduct an experiment on horse grazing which backfired when a horse ate all my data, went to London on a protest and protested in the wrong place by mistake, and passed part of a University course by drawing cartoons of rabbits. Not the most interesting of half years, I'll grant. But then the slim medical files are the dull ones, and the ones you become most jealous of, so, at least in a way, "not interesting" is perhaps a very positive thing indeed.
posted by Turnip @ 7:11 pm
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