People are telling me I shouldn’t do heavy lifting or have good posture until week 6. My surgeon won’t write restrictions past week 3. 💀
(Source: miseriathome)
For Reasons, I need to be devoid of substances for two weeks that include Christmas, New Year’s, and my birthday. This means no coping mechanism drugs/drinks and no anti-inflammatories or pain management.
Not only am I Suffering, but my horrid shift lead has indirectly stated her intentions to do me harm by using a fragrance I’m having an allergic reaction to. And can’t take antihistamines for.
It would also be good for me to avoid stress during this period of time, but we just can’t have that, can we?
Update: I’ve developed a neurological tic. Advice nurse told me to go to urgent care. Urgent care came to the same conclusion as me, which is that it’s stress. Can’t have steroids or muscle relaxers, so I got sent home with a packet on meditation.
So what began as a twitch every 10-40 mins has turned into a full-strength muscle contraction every 2-10 minutes.
I went to the ER and they diagnosed me with ✨stress✨. The “good” news is that if I can fucking relax, these convulsions should resolve on their own within weeks to months.
They did say I could have antihistamines, so that’s nice. Unfortunately, I’ve been coughing so hard at work that my O2 sat got fucked up.
And I forgot to include my dad’s birthday in the list of holidays that I can’t have drugs for.
🌈 I am not coping well. 🌈
Worker’s comp is so fucked up. They waited five weeks to approve therapy for my sprained wrist. Yes, my wrist is still sprained. You know what might have helped that? Having PT for the past five weeks.
(Source: miseriathome)
For Reasons, I need to be devoid of substances for two weeks that include Christmas, New Year’s, and my birthday. This means no coping mechanism drugs/drinks and no anti-inflammatories or pain management.
Not only am I Suffering, but my horrid shift lead has indirectly stated her intentions to do me harm by using a fragrance I’m having an allergic reaction to. And can’t take antihistamines for.
It would also be good for me to avoid stress during this period of time, but we just can’t have that, can we?
Update: I’ve developed a neurological tic. Advice nurse told me to go to urgent care. Urgent care came to the same conclusion as me, which is that it’s stress. Can’t have steroids or muscle relaxers, so I got sent home with a packet on meditation.
For Reasons, I need to be devoid of substances for two weeks that include Christmas, New Year’s, and my birthday. This means no coping mechanism drugs/drinks and no anti-inflammatories or pain management.
Not only am I Suffering, but my horrid shift lead has indirectly stated her intentions to do me harm by using a fragrance I’m having an allergic reaction to. And can’t take antihistamines for.
It would also be good for me to avoid stress during this period of time, but we just can’t have that, can we?
(Source: miseriathome)
I sprained my wrist two months ago and it hasn’t been healing up, so they sent me to an orthopedic specialist for an MRI.
The ortho did a million ridiculously painful “does this hurt?” manipulations of my wrist bones. That was 5 days ago and it definitely made the pain worse lmao unapologetic fuck.
Then he said “yeah, this kind of sprain can take up to six months to heal. If we took an MRI now, it would probably just show a sprain. So let’s give it six more weeks. Maybe it’ll be better by then. And if it’s not, then I’ll make the clinical decision at that time whether you need an MRI or maybe just a cortisone shot to reduce inflammation.”
And I had to go back to the first doc who was like “so did you get the MRI?” and I had to say “no, he said to wait six weeks and maybe they’ll do the MRI then.” So he said “well… I guess we’ll just have to follow up in six weeks then.”
🙄 But I’ve had my wrist x-rayed twice now, so sometimes we can have imaging for funsies as a treat.
(Source: miseriathome)
While I’m complaining, what’s up with medical assistants being absolute dogshit with drug names? The last one who did my intake said “ugh, I bet you would know how to spell all these, since you’re Pharmacy.” Like… first of all, I can spell all of them because I’m the patient who is on them. But also yes, I took Medical Terminology I at a community college and I have a basic fucking grasp of common chemical roots???? I’m not even on any weird meds–only one of the meds I listed isn’t on the top 100 drugs list, and it’s spelled exactly how the syllables sound. I can literally see your screen and the fact that your EHR system populates the suggestions after the first few letters. So sorry you suck at your job, but this is a remediable issue and it is entirely within your own power to change the fact that you are unfamiliar with extremely common meds while working a job where you know you will have to type drug names. Skill issue.
(Source: miseriathome)
If you’re a parent and you sucked at it and your kid moves out and surrounds themselves with people who are better than you and now they don’t care to see you anymore because honestly what benefit would there be to them, I think that’s your own problem actually and you should bear that without involving your kid in it, like maybe you should have tried being a better parent if you wanted to foster your kid’s investment in that relationship, maybe if you actually cared selflessly about your kid you would leave them the fuck alone because you are a detriment to their well-being but idk what do I know, I just live an existence
(Source: miseriathome)
Literally what is up with nurses who come into the med room while I am restocking, and then instead of asking if they can interrupt me to grab their meds, they start???? playing tiktoks on their phone?????? with their volume up???????????? Girl, you are not being polite by letting me finish, you are in fact being very rude and sending the message that you think my job is unimportant enough that you can distract me for your own self-entertainmend. God forbid I breathe too loud when a nurse is trying to count meds, because ~ooh counting is so hard~, but as soon as it’s me doing the work, then yeah obviously the polite way to wait in line is to subject me to noises and speech I have no ability to shut off. Right up there with the nurses who said “oh you can go ahead, we’re just talking” and then had a loud-ass bitch fest right next to me while I was trying to work. Like okay.
(Source: miseriathome)
Today in the cursed world of healthcare, I watched a doctor use her cell phone to text my name, phone number, and symptoms to another clinic for referral. She told me that calling takes too long and if the clinic isn’t staffed, they won’t pick up, so texting is much faster.
Which is why the first thing I did after coming home was dial up Ethics and Compliance to report that my HIPAA privacy rights had been violated.
The bar is so fucking low. It’s genuinely absurd to me that so many people pass med school and still can’t wrap their heads around the concept of PII. On the internet, we would call that shit a straight up doxx.
(Source: miseriathome)
Pretty sure I got a guy fired from my voting location tonight. Honestly, good fucking riddance. If you’re going to be a partisan shithead, say offensive crap to your coworkers, and violate ethical guidelines that you swore to uphold, then you shouldn’t be a goddamn poll worker. Tonight was his last chance to be a professional and he blew it. Five years is a long time to fix yourself, and my god did this guy not step up to the challenge.
(Source: miseriathome)
Two months ago, we ran out of toner for one of the critical printers at work. I, being the only one who ever orders the supplies for this machine despite constantly begging for literally anyone else to participate, naturally had to order the new toner. I bought 3 cartridges.
Each time this happens, the printer has to stay down for several days while the toner ships. Over a dozen reports that print on a daily schedule have to be individually rerouted to the backup printer. In addition, the workstation connected to the printer also has to have its default printer settings flipped, which only managers can do. While we wait for a manager to show up, everything that needs to be printed from that workstation (around 20 pages/hour) has to be manually reprinted to the backup printer.
Meanwhile, all the stuff that couldn’t print to the main printer just sits in the virtual queue. Once the toner actually gets swapped, the entire backlog has to be allowed to clear. There is no workaround for this because the print jobs are stored on the cloud; cancelling a print job does not delete it off the network, so the network just queues it back up again. Only IT has the ability to clear a printer queue, which would require opening a ticket and waiting however many months it takes for our outsourced IT department to give a shit about a non-critical issue.
Clearing the backlog takes 20-40 minutes of continuous printing each time, and somebody has to babysit the printer and keep refilling it with paper throughout. This obviously wastes a lot of time, toner, and paper (and the paper we use for this printer costs an extra $1 per ream due to the nature of the documents we print). Not only that, but it causes the printer to overheat, shortening its lifespan.
I made a pretty big stink about all this the most recent time it occurred, two months ago. Ordering toner is a matter of calling the printer servicer and following the prompts on the phone tree; there is no need to talk to a human at any point because once the system has looked up the printer ID, it says “based on your usage history, you need X supplies” and all you have to do is press 1 to place its recommended order. This can be done by anybody at any time, with no special credentials needed.
This work area is overseen by a specific specialist four days a week. I covered this position for months after the last specialist got fired, then was turned down when I applied for the promotion. But the person who did get hired for it doesn’t do jack shit, and I continue to get stuck with all the work they won’t do–maintaining the printer is only one example of many. So even though I am not in that space as frequently as they are, and even though I don’t get 8 hours a week of workshop time to take care of literally anything extra that needs to be taken care of, and even though I don’t get paid extra for doing specialist-level bullshit, and even though I know the specialist knows about this responsibility and how to take care of it because I trained them and I wrote the SOP for their position which includes ordering the fucking printer supplies… this somehow continues to still be my problem.
So what happened today? The printer ran out of toner, of course! And all the backup toner boxes had “used” written on them, but were left in the normal toner storage spot, rather than being moved to the “used toners for recycling” spot. So I had to place another toner order, reroute a bunch of reports, and flag down a manager to flip the default printer settings, all while staffing a completely different position in the department.
(Source: miseriathome)
Sure, knee pain was fucked up. Then came the hand pain. But then I learned with back pain. But now having dominant wrist pain? Constantly unlocking new levels of existential horror via the failure of critical joints.
(Source: miseriathome)
Today at work, I finally got an MRI safety training that I have literally been asking to take for years. I learned that these parts of the hospital that I frequently go to are way more dangerous than I or any of my department knew about. The MRI manager who led the training asked if we had any questions. I said “yeah, uhh… we have a guy in our department who goes into these spaces a lot and he has a pacemaker.” She was silent for a very long time and then said that she was “deeply concerned.” One of the things that I learned was that all individuals are supposed to be screened before they are allowed to enter that space, including submitting a medical form; the manager also did not like it when I informed her “yeah, I was not aware of any of that, normally we just pick up the phone outside of the MRI department and someone buzzes us in.” She said “they should not be doing that.”
Earlier this week, I got to notify my entire department’s management team “hey, I just learned from an online module that we’re supposed to be garbing up to do this routine task? I explicitly asked multiple people about this when this task got assigned and was told there was nothing special I needed to know. I polled around on first and second shift and everybody said we don’t need to garb up. Who is in charge of this training and when do we receive it? Also we don’t even keep the PPE in the place where we do this. This shit causes cancer.” My shift lead helpfully sent out an email saying “hey wear garb, reach out if you feel like you don’t know how to garb.”
Genuinely feels like I live in a meat grinder world where my body is quite literally just fodder for the cogs of a massive machine.
(Source: miseriathome)
