A thunderclap headache is never a good sign. I knew the intense, nauseating pain meant my brain was bleeding. I lurched to the bathroom to barf, promptly forgot how doorknobs worked and lay down for a little rest, waking up a week later in the hospital with Moaning Myrtle as my roommate. Myrtle had painful skin breakdown from an ostomy site.
A major stroke at 52 is a challenge. Having one while motel homeless with two expensive special needs kids is foolhardy
I had been transcribing for twenty years the afternoon my brain exploded in a cheap weekly rent motel where birddude and I and our two expensive kids {$100000 for three procedures for hip dysplasia, a childhood imprisoned in fetid hip spica casts and 27-weel preemie after LEEP} landed in Eugene, fleeing high NorCal rents.
I fell into transcription at 28. Getting ready to split from hubby #2, the microbiology prof who turned me on to Thomas Kuhn's paradigm shift from theory of humors to germ theory, I found an ad for Colette's Medical Transcription service. I learned machine transcription while temping in college. My only medical training was two years as a bio major. I quit after I failed chemistry for the third time because of abysmal math skills.
After college I worked as a legal secretary for a PI insurance defense attorney. I digested Bekins' boxes of records to prove each plaintiff's symptoms could be explained by pre-existing injuries.. One case involved a worker falling off a stepladder and sustaining a bucket-handle meniscal tear. The op reports for that case allowed me to stumble through the knee arthroscopy Colette gave me to transcribe. Colette interviewed me in a gold lame mini dress, approved my op report sample and hired me at 7 cents/65-character line. She showed me the stacks of reports in the file room to use as reference and said she'd review my work for 15 minutes a day at 4pm; the rest of the time I could ask my coworkers to listen to my blanks. Karen, her sister Sue and Mary graciously trained me. My office mate, Suzy, typed very aggressively on an IBM Selectric typewriter. They had a curious habit of going to the bathroom every hour {bladder training?} then typing and sniffling at a furious rate. Suzy left abruptly one day after CPS came to ask some questions. She don't lie, she don't lie, she don't lie. Cocaine .
I earned $30 the first month, went home and drank heavily while microbiology prof spouse looked at my printouts and asked why the work was hard: they were all perfectly cromulent words. Maybe, but they were often dictated at the airport with the windows rolled down, by a heavily accented dude eating a burger or a soft-spoken Asian per.
Colette had local accounts: Dr Gottlieb had the first AIDS unit at Sherman Oaks Hospital {we MTs scrambled to verify procedures, lab and drug names in preGoogle days. Supply room techs were our friends}. The Grossman Burn center dictated thousands of lines of boilerplate skin grafting and debridement procedures,
Three months laser I was grossing $1000/week. Colette gave me bags of tapes to do at home. The Jewish Homes for the Aging wanted their work printed on bright yellow progress report forms that I loaded into my printer sheet by sheet. Nephrologist Dr G related well to their elderly charges and once dictated a SOAP note to the tune of Oh Tannenbaum. When one patient was obsessed with "cleaning" the walls with pee, Dr G had him issued a squirt bottle of mild cleaning solution.
I subcontracted with two other services and scored a lucrative Work Comp AME account where I constructed the report from the historian's intake notes and physical exam sheet then transcribed the findings and care plan. I was transcribing Dr Sadoff when the Northridge quake hit at 4:30 am. I earned $3000/month
In 1990 my paradigm shifted. I answered an ad in the AAMT journal and signed on with digital dictatiion inc out of Sarasota, Florida. Nirvana. Remote MTs sign onto the platform, review their QA notes then start transcribing the next audio file in the queue. Text expanders like Instant Text let me keyboard "tpcosb" and have "the patient complains of shortness of breath" appear in the document. I saved reports from frequent dictators and edited their H&Ps, consults, and op reports instead of typing each from scratch.These techniques let me produce 450 65-character lines/hour at 9 cents/line with 98% QA scores, grossing approximately $40/hour, working from 9pm to 3am. I transcribed Stanford, Johns Hopkins, Bethesda, Kaiser, the Sutter chain of hospitals in Northern California.
Fifteen years of the most satisfying work I ever did disappeared in a flash that afternoon. The AVM bleed left me slow, clumsy and permanently incontinent. No matter how hard I work that Kegel app my neurogenic bladder's not likely to heal itself.