Saturday, August 9, 2008

What a Challenging Week It's Been, and Continues to Be


Challenge. It breeds character, maturity, strength, all that stuff. And I should be a better person as a result of the challenges this week.

The first week of the month is always a trial, or should I say trial balance, because my "real" job is closing the books of a large hospital, so I'm wrapped up in the "close" (pronounced with a "z" sound, like "cloze", or "clothes"). My life revolves around all my responsibilities in the close. This is the first month of the new fiscal year and we had a new subsidiary charging system come on-line. There were a few problems, but nothing I couldn't overcome. It was just annoying that I kept finding them. I like things to go smoothly. Having to fix them takes my mind away from its smooth-running, orderly monthly checkoff list duties. (Just don't look at the snow of paper on my desk.)

So, it started last Friday, and I was already behind. I kept finding things and fixing them.

Great weekend. I cooked a lot and weather was great.

Monday, I received a call from the Emergency Room. It was The Artist. He still had all his fingers, but he had taken Mother of Artist to the doctor for her normal visit and the doc wanted her to be admitted. Off to the ER. Nothing too life-threatening for a hardy 91-year-old, but she did require a few days' stay. Monday, I spent lots of time in the ER. Tuesday, Wednesday and Thurday, I spent all my breaks, and probably more, visiting her and Friday AM some time on discharge planning.

I work for a hospital, but am usually so far removed from the main business of care-taking, that it is sort of on-the-job training when I really have real, personal business being on a patient floor. It's very interesting and completes the full circle of issues in working for a hospital: the staffing issues, the computer on wheels, the time clocks, the dispensing machines, the needle collection boxes, real medical equipment, not just a tag number in a computer system.

It was difficult getting all my real work done. In July, new spreadsheets with new budgets and new prior years have to be set up, so that takes even more time than usual. The year in some computer systems has to be rolled forward. New process. Finally got the last one resolved at 4:00 yesterday. How I got everything accomplished that I did, I will never know.

Challenge. Character-building.

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