Babbling the midnight oil

Night float, day 2...

I've seen exactly one patient, who was here when I got here, but you know what? I feel good about that patient. It was an adolescent that I took a long time with and I think I managed to get the situation to work in her best interest. It helped that there was a Pedes ER attending on who was just incredibly helpful and interested and invested in this kid.

You know...I have this soft little place in my heart for adolescents that I didn't have any sort of awareness of until this year. Previously, I mostly found them annoying and juvenile and always felt like they were making fun of me. I forget, though, what a complicated and tumultuous time adolescence is by its very nature. Add in screwy social circumstances or caretakers with limited parenting skills, and gosh, these kids just have so much trying to coalesce on them. And, you know, maybe it's the population of kids that I deal with, but I see so much...I don't know what it is. Energy, color, potential, intensity...so much raw possibility, this sort of effervescence of conflict and recombination, this complexity that's simultaneously developing and concluding... It's fascinating. And when you're underneath it, it's overwhelming.

I just don't see it in a lot of my adults. I mean, sometimes I see vestiges of it. Sometimes I see outright mature correlates, these peculiar and disorganized qualities come to fruition. But honestly, a lot of adults seem to have just lost this ineffable, diaphanous quality. Sometimes it seems like it's been sublimated into the unconscious, sometimes it seems like it's been partitioned off and redirected...but sometimes...in others...it just seems like it's gone. Like they've gone flat.

I don't know what that is. I don't know what it means. I obviously can't even describe whatever this is that I'm talking about with any degree of significant eloquence, but, well, it's 3 in the morning.

Does this make sense to anyone who lives outside my head?

Anyhow.

So the other interesting thing about my night has been this - when I got here and read my email, I discovered that I'm being audited for inappropriately accessing a patient's confidential medical records without a release of information on file. Which, I wasn't too concerned about, because, I figured it was one I opened on accident who had the same name as my patient, or, a patient I treated a while ago whom I was checking up on for continuity of care and, you know, silly things like learning. Until...until I got to the patient's name.

It's my record.

From the email conversation that's ensued, apparently, I'm being brought up for disciplinary action for - wait for it - violating my own privacy. And when I explained why I went in, that I added my medications which are prescribed by an outside provider, she told me that was a grave misuse of my access to the system.

Oh, come on.

So...apparently...it's an abuse of power to "alter" my medical record in such a manner. Because, you know, if one day, whilst I'm walking home, I get run over by the Chapel Hill Transit system (God forbid), and I wind up in the ER, all unconscious and bleeding, it's really not important for those doctors to know what goes into my body on a daily basis. Because it won't affect my treatment at all. Thank heavens I was all "ethical" and didn't "alter" anything.

I'm really pissed off about this. I mean, forgetting the fact that my record contains exactly this: the medications I've entered and two test results (a rapid strep and a Flu A aspirate) from when I went to employee health with the flu last year. Oh, and now, it probably shows a pending appointment with a family doc next week (FINALLY I'm going to go get all of this exhaustion and falling down checked out). It has my address wrong. It doesn't have my insurance information. And until said employee health flu visit, it had my name spelled wrong. Forgetting that there's NOTHING THERE, it's my information. It can't tell me anything I don't already know!

So, one of the things I did tonight was fill out a release of information form - to release my own information to myself. For the love of Steve....

Disciplinary action, my fat white ass.

Again I say...anyway.

So, now, I'm hanging out. I finished some paperwork, I disinfected my desk (Ruthie seems to have the plague). I did some laps around the psych department. I read my newly-arrived copy of Franklin Habit's cute new book of knitting cartoons, "It Itches." (SO cute. So Franklin. I love it.) I'd pre-ordered it months ago, so I was excited when I found it on my stoop this evening when I left for work. Last night I watched House and 30 Rock and Doogie Howser reruns on Hulu.

I keep trying to read more important things (like my readings for class tonight), but damn if I can concentrate on anything like that. I concede that I slept well today and thus tonight hate night float a little less, but, considering it's taken me over two hours to write this blog (I keep wandering off to do other very random things and then suddenly thinking, oh! Was I done with my blog?), I don't know that I'm up for great feats of concentration...

Yeah, don't think I'm going to class tonight.

Oh, in related news, I had my last interview for the psychoanalytic society this morning. It was much more pleasant than the one with the intrusive old guy who lived in the country. And I'm relieved that it's all wrapped up and done with.

Alright, I think I'm going to go knit. If anyone's still reading at this point...wow, you're awfully tolerant...