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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781524618650 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | AuthorHouse |
| Publication date: | 07/29/2016 |
| Pages: | 188 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.43(d) |
About the Author
She has authored articles for professional health information journals, and following retirement in 1995, wrote a memoir, recounting her marriage to her oldest daughter’s Indian father. She also published an article about a family of feral cats in Cats And Kittens magazine. She continued to work part-time in medical transcription until her final retirement at age 82, as a way to keep up with the world of medicine—and out of the bingo halls.
Read an Excerpt
The Beat Goes On
By Lynn Regudon
AuthorHouse
Copyright © 2016 Lynn RegudonAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-5246-1865-0
CHAPTER 1
PILGRIMAGE
Today is Sunday. No parking meters to feed. This June afternoon in Seattle is warm and sunny, a perfect time to visit Harborview Medical Center, where my life changed forever.
Only decorative now, a new glass-domed canopy protects the visitor from Seattle's ubiquitous rain. The entry steps are the same, perhaps a little more worn. The great metal doors still open as easily. The marble-floored lobby, now covered with an undistinguished gray rug, is as unwelcoming as it was when I first entered some sixty-plus years ago to interview for a job. The old telephone operator's window is boarded up, and a computer sits on a desk in front of it, unmanned.
Do not tarry, the room whispers; but I do, remembering. Up the few steps to the first floor hallway, my hand rests for a moment on the decorative iron hand rail before crossing to push the down button on the elevator. The next floor below is "ground," just as it was, and I press it.
Exiting the elevator, I turn right, as I did then, but now nothing is familiar. The wide hallway's silvery floor shines brightly; gone are the dull red-and-black rubber tiles of my day. The signs over the new doors are totally different: Radiology, Gamma Knife, Angiography. There are no benches for patients as there were. I am relieved I am alone to walk toward what used to be the Medical Records Department. Double doors now demarcate the end of the original building, opening into another corridor in the first of the new wings to be added. Turning around, I head back down the corridor toward where the Emergency Department and the cafeteria once were. Neither is there. A sign announces that the cafeteria is on B level, and a long corridor at a right angle to the one I am in points to the "West Hospital." I follow this hall, which skirts a huge glass dome. I am guessing it is where the old ambulance court was for the original emergency room. Now it provides natural light for the cafeteria below.
Back up on the first floor, I follow the sign pointing to the Emergency Department, now on the north side of the building. Through the door there is a bank of stations, a chair in front of each. A young man in white sits behind the first, marked "Triage." No patients are sitting at his station or the two other manned stations.
How different from the one office for the admitting clerk, when I worked there. This Sunday there are only a few people scattered in the expansive, thriftily furnished waiting room. No one looks stressed. I wonder how different it will be on the evening and night shifts.
Back to the elevator, I push the button for B level. Strangely, down here, there are remnants I recognize: masses of pipes running along the ceiling, doors opening to corridors that pass under the street that don't look as if they had been replaced since I worked there. Some men in gray coveralls pass by with tools in their hands. I smile to myself. Perhaps some things don't change as quickly.
Down the corridor that says "Cafeteria" in search of a cup of coffee, I find it modern and up-to-date with an espresso stand. Small tables are spread about the large room under the skylight, and more, farther away in its murky reaches. With coffee in hand, I find a seat under the glass dome and put my camera down. I observe the clientele sprinkled about: a man in a white coat, graying at the temples, with a well-dressed young black woman; a younger man in a lab coat concentrating on a laptop computer; two women in surgical greens giggling over sandwiches and coffee; several lone men and women, more disheveled, secreted in the darker corners of the cafeteria. I remove the lens cap from my camera and take a few pictures as unobtrusively as possible.
Finishing my coffee, I make my way out back of the hospital where a landscaped garden creates a quiet haven of lush green lawn amid raised flower beds with concrete surrounds where one can sit, savoring the vista of Seattle and its harbor with a sparkling Puget Sound and the snow-capped Olympic Mountains in the background. A young woman in blue scrubs sits reading on one of the benches scattered around the periphery. A bare-chested, black-haired man in his early thirties wearing threadbare Levi's leans against one of the concrete-rimmed flower beds, a colored shirt drying in the sun draped over a bush nearby. In another corner of the lawn are two wooden raised beds, one short, the one behind it taller. It bears a plaque that says, "This garden was developed for and is maintained by HMC patients during rehabilitation therapy. Please enjoy but do not pick the flowers. Thank you." That definitely warrants a photograph.
I replace the lens cap and make my way back to the car. So many changes in the years since I worked there.
Thinking back, I realize the cascade of events that led me here started with a casual conversation between me and a housemate in my hometown of Hamilton, New York. I was seventeen, a senior in high school.
My mother had married her third husband the summer before and moved to a nearby town. To let me finish in the school where I had begun my education, she rented our house to the mother of a classmate at a reduced rate with the proviso that I could stay there. Mrs. Lanigan; her daughter and my classmate, Mary Alice; Mrs. L's two older sons, Chuck and John; and Wally, one of their close friends made up the household. All three boys were students at Colgate University in town, and it was Wally who became my best buddy that year.
One winter night, nursing hot toddies for snuffly noses, Wally had been telling me about his family and asked, "What about your dad? Do you hear from him very often?"
"I've never heard from him. Don't even know if he's still alive. Mom never talked about him."
"Don't you know anything about him? No pictures even?"
"Not really. The only pictures I've seen were ones of him standing on his hands on top of a cannon, and on top of my grandparents' home up on the hill. He graduated from Colgate, too; that's where Mom met him."
"Aren't you curious about him?"
Wally's comment spurred me to write my paternal grandfather, who lived in Redlands, California, where I was born. He sent me a birthday card every year so I had his address. I enclosed a rather diffident letter to forward to that unknown father if he were still alive. Within the month, I received an epistle — many pages, in small, elegant handwriting, from that long-lost man. He erased in the first sentence any question about whether he cared. He proposed I come to live with his family and attend the University of Washington, where he taught English. He laid out a plan and introduced my new family. I had applied and been accepted at Duke, Bowling Green in Ohio, and Redlands universities, but had not decided. Here was the answer, and there was no question in my mind. My mother was not pleased, but gave in.
Stepping off the plane in Seattle, I was greeted with a warm hug from the dapper, distinguished-looking man, graying at the temples, who was my father. I fell in love immediately. A hug from his wife, Flossie, and smiles, partly curious, from my new-found half-brothers, Glen, Jr. and Trevor. My new family — the adventure had begun.
Fall came, and I registered at the university, one of my first classes being a survey of architecture. High in the gallery of an auditorium holding two hundred, I sat next to an Indian student with a great mop of black hair and gorgeous long-lashed brown eyes, who introduced himself as Nazir Jairazbhoy. We met again off and on at the International Club, which my father had suggested I join. Over the next year we dated often, and he asked me to marry him — often. At first I refused, but he wore me down and in February of 1949, we made it official at the County Clerk's office, accompanied by my family.
Born in India, the son of a British teacher, my father liked Nazir, but my stepmother informed me quietly that marriage was not as acceptable — an old attitude pervasive among the Colonial British that Indians were "inferior." However, Dad kept his own council and did not voice his disapproval to my husband or me.
Nazir and I found out quickly that two cannot live as cheaply as one, and his allowance from India did not go very far. By fall of 1950, it became obvious one of us had to work. He obtained a summer job at Bethlehem Steel until they discovered he was on a student visa, which did not allow him to work in the United States, so he had to quit. (His job title there was priceless — Helper to the Helper of the Punch Press.) Having only enough money to register Nazir for fall classes, I started looking for work. The employment agency sent me to interview at King County Hospital.
CHAPTER 2IN THE BEGINNING
Getting off the bus at Ninth and James, referral slip in hand, I could not miss the place where I had been sent for a job interview. King County Hospital rose before me, its fifteen stories soaring into the autumn sun, dwarfing the nearby buildings. I stood staring for a moment, feeling quite provincial. The little college town from which I had come had no buildings taller than five stories. The hospital stood like a sentinel guarding the top of First Hill, broad-shouldered, protective.
Wide steps and heavy metal-framed doors opened into a bare, marble-floored lobby. No comfortable chairs and tables with popular magazines here, no fish tanks to engage those who waited. No amenities at all. "Go about your business," was the implication.
The only sign of life was a little room with a Dutch door, opening on the right side of the lobby where two women manned a switchboard. Getting directions from one of them, I found my way to the Medical Records Department on the ground level at the end of a long, dimly lit hall. The woman behind the appointment desk motioned me into an alcove of offices on the other side of a large rectangular room. My memory of that first view of the department was the four-drawer steel cabinets lining the room almost all the way around. Files were piled on top of the cabinets, on big tables down the center of the room, and on top of desks. I had never seen so much paper. How did anyone find anything?
The assistant supervisor called my name, a bit hesitantly. "Roslyn ...?" I smiled, used to the hesitation; my married name, Jairazbhoy, gave most people pause. At the end of the short interview, she announced that I had the job of file clerk, and could I start on Monday?
I went home, jubilant. My first full-time job! An end to searching bus stops for dimes and nickels, even pennies. I could hardly wait for Monday.
The first week on any new job is exhausting: new procedures to learn, names to remember, finding one's way around. Hospitals are like little cities. Sometimes it seems as though the architect has taken a perverse pleasure in devising interior corridors as labyrinthine as any Middle Eastern bazaar. It is so easy to get lost if you are new, but at least I could find my way to the department where I was to start working.
Entering the building down a ramp closest to the Medical Records Department on my first day, I was struck by the hallway: dingy, dark yellow walls, lined on one side by wooden chairs and what looked like old church pews. Patients filled these at this early hour, some disheveled, most wearing worn coats, and shoes run over on the sides or heels. "Tatterdees" my father would have called them. Children of sick parents ran up and down the hallway. Sick children sat lethargically on adult laps. At the appointment desk of the Medical Records Department, a short line of walk-in patients waited to have their names taken and be sent off to the appropriate department.
The diminutive, gray-haired department head, Miss Kellogg, a registered record librarian, as the practitioners were then known, gave me a brief orientation to the department. She had me sign the necessary forms, explained my hours and the very few fringe benefits. She told me to buy a white uniform as soon as possible, and gave me my first assignment.
"We'll have you start on the appointment desk," she said. "Mary and Stella will give you a good introduction to the basic procedures. Don't be afraid to ask questions if you don't understand something or can't find a chart."
The appointment desk, enclosed by wood partitions on two sides and a partial glass window facing the hall, was just big enough to accommodate two people sitting. I found out quickly, usually only Mary sat. On the desk were six pads, each a different color. One was for the Emergency Room (ER), and the rest were for the different clinics scheduled that day. Not only did Mary have to deal with the constant flow of patients at the window, but she also had to answer the phone for chart requests from the clinics and the ER. She was a wonder of calm. With the phone ringing, she could still smile at the patient at the window and ask the person on the phone to "Please hold just a minute," while writing on a pad, or giving the patient a card with the clinic name and appointment date. (I wondered in passing why they hadn't found something for her to do with her feet at the same time.)
The clinics usually had the patient's medical record number, which was how the records were filed. The ER requests most often had only the patient's name and birthdate, by which to find the record number in the master patient index. For the first few days, I was given only the chart requests that already had numbers, and did not have to check patients' names against the index. I had enough to learn just to find charts.
Stella, a tall thin young woman, a few years older than my just-barely-twenty explained the filing system. I followed her around like a puppy dog the first day, while she kept up a constant discourse on where the charts most likely would be found. Despite the ring of cabinets lining the entire department, they held only six months' worth of charts. When a patient hadn't been seen in that time, the chart was sent back to inactive storage, a city block down the hall, or so it seemed.
The storage room most closely resembled library stacks. Lights hung between the rows from the high ceiling, casting more shadow than illumination on the sturdy wooden shelves. These were about ten tiers high, with rolling ladders attached to each section and a few portable ones at aisle ends. The woman in charge of inactive storage was Harriet, maybe 50 years old, thin, with gray hair pulled back into a bun. She was not particularly communicative, and while pleasant enough on the phone, she was decidedly not excited about new employees. She looked at me with obvious misgivings.
"I hope you're more careful with the records than most of the new ones," she said, looking over the top of her bifocals at me "You must understand that a misfiled chart means there is no information about that patient for the doctors. That could be a lot of trouble for the patient. See to it you don't file anything here that I don't check. Understand?"
I smiled and nodded, and silently determined I would not be an example of "those new ones."
By the end of the week, I had learned where to find most charts and get them to their scheduled destination, as well as most of the places charts could hide when they weren't in the regular files.
Late one afternoon toward the middle of the week, I decided to check one for ER with only a name and birthdate, John Johnson. "Have you used the master patient index before?" Mary asked me.
"No," I replied and thought, how hard can that be? I know how to alphabetize.
As I went over to the index files, I heard Mary tell Stella, "You'd better help her. I don't think she's looked anything up yet."
Slightly miffed, I confidently went to the J's and discovered to my consternation that the names starting with J were in no alphabetic order I could detect. Stella watched my confusion and chuckled. Then she pointed to an instruction sheet attached at each end of the bank of cabinets. This identified the method as Soundex, a phonetic system using the sound of consonants after the first letter of the last name to create a three-digit code, ignoring vowels. Johnson was found behind J-525, the codable letters n-s-n, then filed alphabetically by first name. There were John Johnsons, Jensens, Jansens, Johansens and more behind this J-525 code. At last I found the John Johnson with the right birthdate. There must have been 500 Johns. Well, perhaps I exaggerate. Soundex proved so interesting that I took the instructions home and practiced on the phone book. By the beginning of the next week, I was an expert.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Beat Goes On by Lynn Regudon. Copyright © 2016 Lynn Regudon. Excerpted by permission of AuthorHouse.
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