November 26, 2008
Wednesday
El Milagro: Jason the Tech sticks me painlessly and I settle in to reading a student's paper. Then he tells me that he has to wait for about 5 minutes to hook me to the machine cause they want the Heparin that he just shot me with to circulate completely and it does one circuatin a minute, about. "That's weird", I think. I ask "How long has that been a procedure?" and Jason replies that it has been a procedure for "awhile now" and I can tell that this is one of those things that Jason does but many of the "old timers" just skip. So, I continue to investigate. He says they are always supposed to let the Heparin circulate so they don't give it to you and then just suck it into the filtering system. He says that others "probably just forget cause there are so many things to remember to do in setting people up." And, the edicts from administration keep coming on down the pike... so this month it is one thing they are focusing on and then a month or so later it is something else.
I ponder that and wonder how such a supposedly "leading provider of dialysis services" can operate in such wishy washy ways... and then I wander off in my mind comparing the glitches I hear about DaVita to my dad's stories about the military, my memories about working for the state of Texas, and things I've heard from friends about places they work... and it all becomes clearer in my brain of brains! Bureaucracy breeds incompetency! The more administrations add on to the pile of rules, the more plain old folks ignore the rules. When caring people get overloaded with procedures and rules, they come to a point of overwhelm and then simply choose which procedures are important to them and then let the others go by the wayside. In the medical arena this can be seen in the number of medical staff who "forget" to wash their hands while working, even though that behavior is clearly connected to the spread of serious infections in hospitals. We blame individuals for these kinds of things and yet it seems to me that the overload of procedures causes well-minded folks to busily forget or slip by some important details... as Jason suggests.
We are in the postmodern world, where individuals follow their own rules (No, I don't mean chaos, I mean many truths with small "t"s) whereas in the modern world, people had to follow procedures more closely because they were the Truth (with a capitol "T"). My brain doesn't have the answer but I hallucinate that the Japanese group approach may increase people's sense of responsibility and pride for sticking to the little details. What, dear readers, do you think?
I shake my head off this train and focus more on the paper I have on my lap about SFBT and depression in adolescents. There are typos! I hate that. You would think that graduate students with advanced computers and programs like Word "X" would be able to produce a paper without typos and simple grammatical errors. It is a pet peeve of mine that I try to let the students in on when I say in the syllabus, "check for grammar". Catching these little edits takes away from my reading for content... so, I end up reading twice.
I review the paper, make some edits, and shake my frustration about grammar off and turn to the news. Then I nap for awhile and wake to watch the end of Jim Lehrer's News Hour and the coverage of the attacks in Mumbai.
I drift off again and wake again to watch the last half of Criminal Minds and the first part of Barbara Walters' interview with the Obamas and then it is time to unhook, weigh out, and walk out into the brisk night air and truck on home. So it goes in dialyland.
Notes: In at 76.7 and out at 75.5 kgs.
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