I have loved, loved, loved my choice for March in my 12 in 12 project.  So much so that I lost track of time and realize I never posted here!  So here you go….

Once each semester I show something from the TED Talks.  I have yet to find a student who ever heard of these, and perhaps you haven’t either.  TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) is a nonprofit devoted to “Ideas Worth Spreading.”  Starting in 1984, it has expanded its presence, its topics, and its media to reach the global community.  On TED.com you can watch over 1000 short presentations from around the world for free!  I find them fascinating on so many levels.  The speakers are engaging, inspirational, from many cultures, many professions, many experts in their fields, many “ordinary” people.  The TED Spring Conference was recently held in Long Beach, CA, and TEDGlobal will be held this summer in Scotland.  There is also TEDMed, TEDWomen, TEDIndia, TED Salons, TEDx Program, TED Fellows Program, TED Open Translation Project, to name but a few.

At the TED Conference 50 speakers over 4 days speak for 18 minutes on topics from science, business, the arts, and global issues.  They also have some shorter presentations including music, comedy, and performances.  I would love to be one of the 1000 people in attendance live for one of these conferences or TEDTalks, but for the month of March I was at least participating in cyberspace and watching some of the current videos.  I tried to mix it up by watching videos that were not necessarily speaking to me by their title but knew they may be “good for me.”  I was not disappointed in any of them.  Here is the list of the 31 TED talks I enjoyed, and maybe you will too:

Jeffrey Kluger:  The sibling bond

Vijay Kumar:  Robots that fly…and cooperate

Susan Cain:  The power of introverts

Kevin Allocca:  Why videos go viral

Avi Rubin:  All your devices can be hacked

Tan Le:  My immigration story

Andrew Stanton:  The clues to a great story

Jennifer Pahlka:  Coding a better government

Lucianne Walkowicz:  Look up for a change

Chris Bliss:  Comedy is translation

Amy Purdy: Living beyond limits

Rob Reid: The $8 billion iPod

Brené Brown: Listening to shame

Adam Savage:  How simple ideas lead to scientific discoveries

Greg Gage:  The cockroach beatbox

Allan Jones: A map of the brain

Scott Summit: Beautiful artificial limbs

Larry Smith: Why you will fail to have a great career

Lucien Engelen: Crowdsource your health

Myshkin Ingawale: A blood test without bleeding

Shilo Shiv Suleman: Using tech to enable dreaming

Noel Bairey Merz: The single biggest health threat women face

Chris Anderson:  Questions no one knows the answers to

Billy Collins: Everyday moments, caught in time

David Gallo Deep ocean mysteries and wonders

Taylor Wilson: Yup, I built a nuclear fusion reactor

TED Women:  Award-winning teen-age science in action

Scott Summit: Beautiful artificial limbs

Peter Saul: Let’s talk about dying

Ayah Bdeir: Building blocks that blink, beep and teach

Anders Ynnerman: Visualizing the medical data explosion

I love the way the TED Talks connect the dots in this fast-paced world, bringing information to a level we can all understand, in an entertaining way.  Coincidentally, once April rolled around I was still getting getting drawn to TED from a variety of places – I discovered TEDTalks are on the Science Channel,  from a link on Facebook I watched “On the Virtual Dissection Table” by Jack Choi, and yesterday medGadget posted on TEDMED 2012.  TEDMED 2013 is right around the corner!  In the meantime, I might just have to watch streaming live tomorrow the TEDxSummit Opening Night from Doha, Qatar…..

 Every so often it makes sense to emerge from the trenches we dig for a living, and ascend to a 30,000-foot view, where we see, to our astonishment, an intricately interconnected whole. ~TED.com

 

Right around January 1^st I begin to get a little anxious.  Still exhausted from the holidays, faced with a houseful of decorations, sweets and calorie-laden leftovers, and with work obligations creeping back in, the outside world starts bombarding us with the “resolutions” we should be working on….lose weight, eat healthier, exercise, take inventory of our lives from top to bottom.  These are all terrific goals but most of us find those not sustainable over the long haul of an entire year unless they become a lifestyle change.  Don’t get me wrong, I did go back to the gym, made homemade soup, balanced the checkbook, pulled out the tax documents, finished up the Christmas cookies (I am not perfect), and even got a mammogram, but honestly I can’t get too enthused about any of this and it is only week one.   I hope to make good choices in the health category going forward but…..ask me when it is week 26. 

And then came Monday morning.  I read Kathy’s blog about her three words for 2012 – education, focus, write.  Now there were 3 words I could wrap my head around.  Kathy wasn’t suggesting she obtain her PhD this year, run a marathon, or write a book….(oh, wait, she may just write a book) ….but rather suggested she have a theme for her self-improvement over 2012.  I totally enjoyed reading her plans and anticipate a few twists and turns along the way as she fills us in on her progress.

However, it was the mention of the blog Fitarella that really got my mind going.  Just the name Fitarella made me smile….Cinderella at the gym is what I imagined.  In any case, I clicked to the blog and read up on the “12 in 12” and immediately knew this was going to work for me! 

“Pick one thing to do consistently every day for a month (see below for suggestions.) It can be something new you want to try, something you want to get better at or something you want to see if you can live without. Commit to doing this thing every day for that month no matter what, even when you don’t want to, even when it hurts, even when it sucks. The practice is the reward.”

Fitarella offers suggestions for activities that may be new to us, may be old to us, or may even be something just not necessary.  You mean I can DELETE something from my life?  Hmmmm.  This was sounding better and better.  I think following Fitarella and anyone else who chimes in will be part of the fun.  I plan to post here what I am doing – or not doing – for each of my 12.  So-o-o-o-o for my first “12 in 12” I have committed to organizing something (anything!!) for 15 minutes a day, every day, no matter what for the entire month of January.  I have to be honest, 15 minutes is not a very lofty goal but I am totally scared to commit to more in case I fail.  What can I say?  So far I am an overachiever. 

So I am going to do my own little version of Fitarella…….Her tag line is “Choose. Practice. Realize.”  I am going to “borrow” her three words and follow her “12 in 12.”  I am not sure where this will lead me but I can’t wait to figure it out…..so far so good….stay tuned!

No matter how good any MT tells you he or she is at their job, no matter how many times they will insist their work always goes through with 95 to 99% accuracy, we all have one very real stumbling block in common, and sometimes it is no little thing! It doesn’t really get talked about much … well, let’s face it, if you were the MT sending out these gems (a few of mine that I have owned up to publicly over the years) …

MF instead of MD.
Sh**ory (y’all can fill in those 2 missing letters for yourself) for history.
Trail for trial, as in we will start a “trail” of MS Contin.
Slaplingooophorectomy for salpingooophorectomy.

… would you want to confess that those were your handiwork if you were an MT?

“Oh, yes, I have 99% accuracy, except for, oh, just let me just hand you the list, that would probably be the quickest way to do this.” Nope, not many of us really want to do that!

I can pretty much guarantee that every single working MT (even if they won’t admit it in public) has his/her own personal list of words that they have created macros to double check each document for. Macros that carefully search and replace that dreaded XXXX, MF, with MD, so that those reports did not get sent on through for that particular dictator to sign … 12 times … before we received a pretty unhappy faxed copy with that circled in red, followed by a whole bunch of ????? I don’t think you will find any approved MT school curricula that specifically trains MTs NOT to do that!

Certainly there are many reasons why it happens … its a typo; a macro error; I must have forgotten to run spell check; I wonder if I may have undiagnosed dyslexia? I hit send before I should have (my personal favorite, but I warn you it rarely makes the client happy to hear that one).

My theory is that each MT’s brain has certain words that it does not process correctly and never, ever will. The eyes look right at that word and just do not SEE that there is anything wrong with it. I sure can’t back that up with any scholarly treatises in industry magazines parsing this dirty little secret up one side and down the other, with all sorts of citations and notations to reference Dr. Purfit Dikation’s groundbreaking article that single handedly set the Guinness record for the first ever recorded loud enough slaplingosmack to be heard throughout MTdom! But I am certain that it is a very real phenomenon, and, no matter how many years you have been an MT, no matter how many times you transcribe them, those words will always, always pop up on the page incorrectly as long as your fingers hit the keyboard.

I tried once to excuse myself when a physician (she of the slaplingooophorectomy fame) asked “why” does this keep happening …

Slaplingology, the study of the science of the technique employed when smacking oneself in the forehead with the open palm. It is very much a learned process, with subtle nuances one does not suspect at first glance, and takes years to perfect.

Slaplingosmack is the sound that results from practicing the above technique over and over and over … slaplingobam is reserved for overly aggressive slaplingosmacks that leave a big ol’ red spot in the middle of your forehead for hours.

All I can say is that it is a good thing that dictator had a sense of humor.

My children are both grown, married, moved from home. I promised them both that I would keep their bedrooms as they were for 6 months and after that, if they had not moved back, the walls were coming down. So, here we are, no children moved back in and I am taking down the first set of walls. For the first time in my working MT life I am going to have a proper office, with a door that locks! Our house is very small, a Jim Walter stilt home, stuck up in the air, with a breathtaking view of … well, in the wet season, swamp; in the dry season, dirty brown palm fronds. But it is ours, it is paid for, and finally after years of using any extra money we might have had to pay for things like medicine for ear infections and school supplies I can actually justify spending money on something other than the bare necessities.

I am going to a have a real office with the bathroom! Something a bit bigger than the cubbyhole we have muddled by with since the house was built. I am thinking ahead, planning for a future when, with a tiled shower containing a built in seat, my daughter can simply plunk me down and hose me off! My son’s old bedroom will become the new bathroom, and we will be able to use the “old” bathroom while the new one is under construction. A good plan since my husband was not exactly in love with the thought of rigging up a shower stall downstairs with a curtain around it (not that we really have any neighbors to wander by and spot us in the buff, but ya never know!) and the alternate “loo” would have been a 2-minute walk through the woods out to his shop/barn … not exactly an inspiring thought when one is in a hurry, at night, in the dark! Once the new bathroom is done, the old bathroom will become my office! A real one, with a door, file cabinet, a chair that I can roll all around! I can make HIPPA happy, HITECH happy, and my MTSO happy all at the same time. I can have a sit-down computer station, and a stand-up station for the days when the bone-on-bone spine is screaming at me to get out of the chair.

Then, in the midst of picking out tile colors, discovering a round, red clay face of a man holding his nose to put on the wall in front of the … throne … I found the “Numi”!

A customizable “smart toilet” this thing ranks right up there with sweet cane syrup poured over biscuits as far as I am concerned. I can adjust the seat position, the water temperature and the pressure! It has ambient lighting (I am not quite sure why) and a built-in sound system with rear speakers and audio jack for an MP3 player. Sitting on the throne singing along with Seal, Sting, the immortal Chairman of the Board, a little reggae …. ahhhhhh.

For a mere $6300 I can have an adjustable heated seat, a foot warmer for those really cold Florida mornings, a stainless steel self-cleaning bidet wand with a dryer (sounds a tad complicated but if I can figure out a hospitals EMR setup it should not be hard to learn how to use)! It has a motion-controlled seat and lid that will automatically open when I walk up to it, and, when I am ready to leave, close itself. No more sitting down blindly in the middle of the night to realize (when one feels that really cold water) that my husband forgot to put the seat down!

Tripping a bar of light on the floor at the side of the toilet automatically raises the seat. No more stooping and bending. No more levering oneself up by hanging on to the towel bar! And, it automatically does that nifty thing the toilets at Disney do, flush themselves when you walk away. Even though it means spending the entire bathroom redo budget on this one thing I am determined that nothing less than a Numi is going to grace my new bathroom.

Of course, that means that the chair in my new office, once I have moved into it, of necessity, is going to look like this

at least for the 3 years of medical transcription I just added to my target retirement date … I figure it will take just about that long pay off the Numi!