Camping, and diagnosis momentum

I hope you had a lovely weekend.

We camped with our daughters in the Yellow River State Forest to our south. We hit the Harper’s Ferry Volunteer Fire Department’s pancake breakfast on Sunday. The campground was overrun with hungry tent caterpillars. My girls invented a new game called Hunger Games for Tent Caterpillars, which involved tossing the “tributes” into the campfire. The survival rate was nil.

Here’s an article that talks about how errors in one part of the medical record can be copied and passed on if they are not verified, until they are all over the patient’s chart and then nobody believes it’s a mistake. The article calls this “diagnosis momentum, a phenomenon whereby ‘once diagnostic labels are attached to patients they tend to become stickier and stickier.’” This was not a transcriptionist’s mistake in this case, but I have seen it happen that way too: The first error is a transcription error, the dictator signs off on it without noticing the error, and it runs from there, gaining momentum with each new provider who reads it and then dictates into the record once more. (I think you will probably have to register for the site to read the article but it's free, and they have great stuff.)

Grad school update

I have one semester of an expected total of six complete, seven credits so far, and so far have a 4.0 grade point average. Honestly in many ways it's easier than my undergrad work. The work itself is much more challenging, but I get to take just one course at a time and give it my undivided attention (undivided, that is, other than for work, commuting, the family, the house, the wedding, Barry getting ready to leave for a summer internship at Mayo, and getting Kieffer squared away for college in the fall).

My first course was called Authentic Leadership, in which we explored leadership theory and worked at formulating our own individual leadership philosophies. It was a great way to start things off and get to know the members of my cohort (and they are wonderful people!). Next was Legal and Ethical Decision Making, in which we talked about business law and how ethics fits in (or at least how it should). I just started my third course, Health Care Systems, which is required for health care emphasis students in the MBA program. Seven weeks. Eight papers of varying lengths. I wrote two of them this past weekend. Lots of reading, lots of writing, and the writing is all in APA style, which I loathed at first but which has grown on me (obviously a sign that I am losing it).

Since my undergrad degree has nothing to do with business, I have to show competencies in five areas including business law, finance, economics, and two more I can't remember at the moment, so I am taking a couple of pass/fail "boot camp" courses to cover these. Still about $500 a credit and don't count toward my MBA credit total so I am anxious not to have to take all of them. I can submit portfolios of work experience for consideration in lieu of the courses and am planning on doing that for three of the five.

I do love being back in school. It's just a demanding schedule all around.

P.S. I just learned something new: When you try to write a Blogger post on an iPad, it ignores your paragraph breaks.

Wedding

I am so far behind on sharing things with you that I don't even know where to start.

So I'll start with this:



My firstborn, Britta, is engaged to be married to Amadeus Gandy, a young man she met in college. They plan to marry on August 11th here in our back yard, a small family wedding. Amadeus' career plans are to be a chaplain in the US Army, so after they both finish their bachelor's degrees at Viterbo, they will be heading out to Fort Wayne, Indiana, so he can go to Concordia Theological Seminary to study for his MDiv. Britta will have student teaching to do, which she hopes to do in Fort Wayne, and then she plans on continuing school while teaching, studying American Sign Language. They are energetic people and I am confident they will accomplish all this.

We are very happy with them and their love for one another and pray for many decades of fruitful married life for them.

April Fool's Day

Trivia

This morning while driving to work, I correctly answered a trivia question on KDEC Radio out of Decorah: "In 1987, a Texas man was fined $10,000 and sentenced to 10 years of probation for stealing 79,680 somethings from a hospital. What did he steal?" It's toilet paper. I'll admit, I totally guessed. I just wondered what someone might steal from a hospital and thought that would be available. Not exactly easy to steal, though: What did he do, hide it under his coat? and 79,680 rolls? Really? Anyway, my prize is a gift certificate to a new homebrewing supply shop that opened recently in Decorah called From Grain to Glass. That will make my husband happy, he's a homebrewer.

Kohls Cares for Kids score

Welcome back to the most neglected spot in the Blogosphere. I end up posting most of my news in infobytes on Facebook because my attention span is so short these days, getting pulled in dozens of directions at once. Anyway I thought of something cool to share:

I have this daughter who is growing like the prettiest weed you ever did see. That kid has shot up nearly 2 inches in height in 6 months. She is outgrowing clothes so fast... So I had to do a midyear clothes shopping trip to get her through the rest of the school year.

We went to Kohls. Here's what we did: We hit the clearance and sales racks hard. By the time we went through the checkout lane the total in the cart was about $437. (Eek!) I got 15% off because we used our Kohls charge, bringing it down to about $380. We also got $70 in Kohls Cash (a promotion they run pretty frequently where you get $10 in Kohls Cash for every $50 you spend).

The next week Barry took the Kohls Cash in and bought himself some things he needed for school, two pair of jeans and two shirts. He came out almost exactly even on the $70.

Now the Kohls bill has arrived, and I am going to buy Kohls Cares for Kids gift certificates from Blessed Sacrament Parish in La Crosse to pay off the bill. One of my staff has a daughter at the private school run by Blessed Sacrament and my purchases count against her tuition. So I buy $380 in Kohls scrip, and Kohls pays 4% of that in benefits. So that's $19 that goes to Blessed Sacrament.

So even though it was a whopping huge amount to shell out at once, thanks to the great sales at Kohls and the generous giving programs of that company, it went a long way.

Pretty cool. :)

Short film: "The Last Day"

Really affected me.

2011 Safecastle Freedom Awards: 2nd Place Winner

My essay Preparedness for Young People took 2nd place in the essay category of the 2011 Safecastle Freedom Awards. I'm very happy about this! I'm still shocked that I made it to the finals, so winning is just another shock... and I was more excited about the 2nd prize (the Excalibur dehydrator) than the 1st prize (the Katadyn water filter) anyway.