The Accidental Boilermaker

Today at work my project was to figure out how to make 2 tasks last 6 hours. So I first spent 30 minutes in the cafeteria drinking coffee while my colleagues ate breakfast. Then I reviewed a chart for 30 minutes for a patient who never showed up. That brought me to about 9:30, so I cleaned every possible surface touched by human hands. Finally, I had to start task #1 - writing up exit reports - which I dragged out till about 11:30. I got to waste the last 30 minutes till lunch talking with a past patient. I took a nice, leisurely lunch and then began task #2 - creating graphs in excel for our department's end-of-the-year Performance Improvement report. I don't make the graphs look super fancy or anything, but I am seriously the only person who knows how to use excel. Then I came home and ran 6 miles through an inch of snow - talk about a calf workout.

I learned today that Purdue is switching some employees' health insurance from United Healthcare to Cigna. I'm not sure how many employees this will affect, but the big problem is that Cigna has a $30 co-pay per exercise session. The average patient comes to cardiac rehab 24 times, so that is $720 in co-pays! It's a sign of the times; my boss remarked that we're probably going to see more insurance companies charging co-pays for rehab. It is sad to think that even with insurance, some people can't afford the care they need.

Nate took me to see Star Wars - In Concert for my Christmas present. It was a lot of fun. The show was great, Anthony Daniels was funny, and the music was amazing. They had a little mini museum of original costumes you could look at before the show.

I saw my first patient today on Effient . It is a platelet inhibitor just like Plavix . And if you're in cardiac rehab, you're probably on Plavix. Plavix is expensive. Its patent will expire in 2011, but with this new drug, patients may still pay through the nose to keep their stents open. I'm not sure if health care reform will help with the exorbitant medication prices out there, but I hope it does. Maybe doctors won't just prescribe Effient because Eli Lilly has got them in their pocket but because it's best for their patient. Apparently, about 30% of Whites and Blacks (and 60% of Asians) have a gene variation that doesn't allow them to break down Plavix into its active form. So if these people have a new, shiny metal stent in a coronary artery and sticky platelets, they are at greater risk of suffering a blood clot and a subsequent heart attack or even stroke. Effient is easier to metabolize and therefore will work for most individuals, but carries ...

I got a really nice compliment at work on Friday. I had to teach the education class that day. I generally only teach one class - Stress and Relaxation. I wasn't really feeling like teaching and before getting the classroom ready, I said a quick prayer that class would go well. Once in class, I figured we had everybody who was coming, but the wife of a patient said to wait because she thought another wife was coming. I was pretty sure she was mistaken because I had just asked this lady's husband if he was going to class and he said no. But just a few moments later, this woman walks in and says she wasn't planning on coming, but when she saw it was me teaching, she changed her mind. She told me I always have a smile on my face and really seem to enjoy my job, so she knew class would be good. What a confidence booster! Compliments and songs by Michael Buble make me happy.