Let me see the schedule for tomorrow. I am first call.
"Let's see where there are two long rooms going. There is this (robotic room with gyn cases) and this (awake neurosurgery that starts thirty minutes before the rest of the regular OR start times)." she said.
I really hope I get the robot room. I don't like working with him (neurosurgeon), and the early start makes me drive thirty minutes out of my way to a sitter to drop the kids off there for them to drop off at school. All for fifteen minutes' extra time. I replied.
"Well, he kind of feels the same way about you."
"I thought so."
"He doesn't like many people, really. Don't take it personal."
Here is an example of the Natural Wedge that is driving apart the dimensions. This neurosurgeon, is a control freak. After the result from the deep brain stimulator last week, the one I inherited when I was on call, he stopped in the OR, looked around and triumphantly said, 'See? THIS, this is what you work for: no matter how long it takes, no matter how difficult it is, THIS, the perfect result is why we are here and what THIS is all about!'
This is the one where I kept jiggling the legs every three minutes for five hours (an unspeakable offense against the specialty of anesthesia) and giving Reiki both to patient and room for him to ACHIEVE that perfect result! I don't buy into any of that crap that originated with Osler, who said, 'the only problem with being on call every other night is that you miss half the cases.' It's Manifest, my three-dimensional friend, it's the manifestation of healing. My Multidimensional Consciousness makes me feel like Dr. Mc Coy from Star Trek while I am watching you do barbaric willfulness by Best Practices (the 'one way' to do any given procedure based on randomized controlled studies and research that is being mandated by the government).
Multidimensionality is NOT going to win you any brownie points with any Three-dimensional healers in traditional medicine. You are going to repel them, repulse them, and make them uncomfortable as hell because your Vibration is incompatible with them.
Light attracts Light. Light drives out the Darkness. Fear is incompatible with Light.
And I am very 'sparkly' according to my Cousin Susie who is on the Other Side.
So I left the OR to go to my next 'assignment'.
At o'dark thirty that morning, when I woke up, I got dressed. I put on my usual attire-comfortable old jeans and a tee shirt. Who is going to see me on the way in to work? Environmental services? Nobody else is HERE except the OR staff, and we are all in scrubs, anyway!
Well, mid-day, I was approached to attend a meeting to discuss the electronic anesthesia record. Great. Now I have my short day to do errands, buy food for the empty refrigerator, and pick up the housekey from my sister by the ocean that she forgot to give back yesterday--all my plans scrapped! You see, attendance at meetings like this is not compensated. And all of my colleagues are either at the helm giving anesthesia during cases that or running, or wanting to head home because they are too smart to volunteer for anything like this. Cornered, I said, 'yes'.
So I had to buy clothes! In my one hour free, I went to the local discount store. I bought two pairs of slacks, three blouses, two dresses (my new favorite dress in the world, and my new second-favorite dress in the world), a cardigan, a nightgown, a Hello Kitty bathrobe, and panties that won't show through the second-favorite dress in the world all for the price I would have spent on a dress without batting an eye. The total came to $222.
On the way to the register, something caught my eye: a little girl's tee shirt with the words, 'Good girl to Great' on it. Again, after I went back to the dressing room and changed clothes for the meeting, that tee shirt caught my eye again, with a message to pay attention to it.
The meeting I was told started at five by my boss who asked me, at five-thirty by the Chief of the OR, started at six. The food provided was kind, but not particularly inviting to Multidimensional me. Too-much-meat salad, caesar salad with chicken (fortunately on the side), icky lukewarm rotini pasta dish that was vegetarian, tiny designer pizzas-I took one slice of cheese and steered clear of the meat. Where are the drinks? I asked the fellow attendee. He showed me the refrigerator, and said, 'we are low, we only have two choices, water and Coke.' That's okay, I don't drink soda. And he looked at me like I had some feathers growing out of somewhere and was a total freakazoid, took a sip of his new can of Coke, and walked away.
The goal of the meeting is simple:
*Medicare is only going to reimburse hospitals who can prove they are in COMPLIANCE
*Electronic medical records and paperless anesthesia records give DATA they can point to and PROVE they are in COMPLIANCE. Look these terms up SCIP, Leapfrog, Beta-blocker protocol (this is one that GAVE people heart attacks who were not originally on them and we dutifully gave them to everybody intraop as told by Best Practice, which had to be changed to giving them ONLY to people who were on the in the first place).
*Everybody else in the field of medicine is going to have to take a class, buy EXPENSIVE equipment, hire consultants and change how they do everything! (look at my blog post on the Anesthesia Record to get an idea of what kind of information is captured on a paper anesthesia record).
That is the score.
Who was in the room? The obese billing woman who came late. The Studio 54-ready doc who had turned into an Informatics specialist, sitting next to his buddy, The-Simple-Old-Country-Birthing-Babies doc who also had turned into an Informatics specialist, the Saavy Latina who is from the computer company, the I-am-Having-a-Bad-Hair-Day woman who is thinking I-am-Looking-Really-Good with this permed long colored hair that covers her face who is the Computer Expert, the Project-Leader who is an americanized asian looking to get this project off-to-a-good-start. Next to her was, High-Ranking-Nurses who will do anything to get out of charting in the OR. These took up a whole leg of the U-table configuration. Then there were anesthesiologists from all of the hospitals going to be involved.
Their goal? Brand-Name-Anesthesia-Electronic Record Implementation and Physician Engagement Meeting. This was a Three-Dimensional Management Frenzy looking for someone to Leave Their Practice for 'twenty hours a week' compensation by the organization but would be working double to triple that to get the project done. For two years. This, they called, 'a commitment'.
Their message? MBA gibberish such as:
anesthesia champion
Key phases and partnerships
Coin builders
Retool a look at processes
'you spend time doing high-quality work and you want that information being accessed by others' ?!?
(since when do non-anesthesiologists need to look at the anesthesia record?)
Facility Based Champion with Bidirectional Interface that is Pretty Transparent, not Lone Wolves
A major opportunity
Workflow commonalities
My Multidimensional self had to fight off the giggles as I watched them jockey for position, and spar words with an elegant glove across the room. I knew this was the gateway to Big Brother, where all of our Quality Measures are calculated electronically, and simple documentation has morphed into the realm of 'cover your ass' anesthesia, to the point that the physician turns AWAY from the patient after induction to chart-chart-chart and the surgeons get irritated and call them on it. 'We get in trouble if the record is not right' we used to say to surgeons at my old job, where an electronic anesthesia record was rolled out. I knew there were starships barely cloaked overhead day and night. I felt the swarm of earthquakes in Southern California. Gaia is changing! And as Reiki Doc, I knew that their systems are going to go on unchanged in the third dimension where people like that will have no clue what is going on with Gaia, and their Multidimensional brothers and sisters will have reunited with their Galactic Family and gone with Gaia after the upcoming Ascension. So THIS is the group that is going to have cold water dumped on them like Poofness says!
I left the meeting, and got into my car. I have a nice car. I drive a black Mercedes E350. I had Manu on, my favorite CD by Kauwila*. It is instrumental accompaniment to the birds of Kilauea. When the music is on, I let my hair down. My soul can breathe. It is like an i.v. infusion of Light and I drink it in deeply to every cell of my parched being. (Like any native Southern California, I spend much of my time in my car. Someone said once our vehicles are like out lotus blossoms, our little world apart, in which we develop spiritually). And I remembered, 'Good girl to Great' sounded an awful lot like 'Good To Great', a book that a former chairman of mine had forced all the department to read before he crammed the electronic anesthesia record (we want to be the FIRST!), and several rounds of layoffs (yours truly included on the six-docs-in-one-day round) down our throats. Some of the companies that had 'turned things around' that were touted in that book, were Freddic Mac and Fannie May (now dismantled), Circuit City (ours is now a Wine Super Store), and Wells Fargo Bank (Financial Tyranny, anyone?)...how ridiculous is that???
I had a hearty laugh with the Hawaian Birds on my way home. Spirit, I have to hand it to you--point well-made!
Namaste,
Reiki Doc
* available at www.letyourjoyshine.com
