This past week has been what we call around these parts an ‘all the way bad" week. Work continues to be stressful, busy and often overwhelming. Today I have a better outlook after surviving a weekend of three straight days of call, most of which was spent breathing hospital air and not seeing my baby. It would be downhill from here, if my father-in-law, he of the no return ticket to Spain, were not due to arrive any day now.

On top of the long hours and four nights of not being home to help put my daughter to bed, last week was complicated by mechanical difficulties. On Thursday I finally realized that for seven days all labs drawn at a specific location were not being sent to our office. I didn’t immediately notice what was the loss of only ten or so labs a day, but when I did figure it out (thanks to my OCD unable to sleep brain cataloging endlessly at night) the backlog of seventy or so un-addressed labs was the final straw of a bad, bad week. I was still training new interns, short a full time nurse, dealing with a transition from film to digital radiographs, running the office alone, missing my family, and the computer in my office had been unable to communicate with the hospital for two weeks. I only use my office computer to receive my countless administrative and scheduling emails, check labs and (now) x-rays, but having to wait for a busy secretary’s computer to open up every time I needed a potassium level was driving me insane. My nurse manager was calling IT every day, and every few days they’d call back and tell me to re-boot and the dumb thing would remain a big paperweight. My frustration level was High.

After the lab backlog Thursday I came home and just cried. I didn’t sign up to be an administrator, I miss seeing patients, I miss my family and is it too much to ask that I have functioning equipment, really? I sobbed on Tim’s shoulder and he looked at me, appalled. I wish I had asked him about the computer situation before, because he quickly and easily explained the functioning of the IT mind. On his advice, Friday morning I called "my" IT guy, then I called every other member of the IT department including the department head to share how he wasn’t able to figure out my problem. I also used the words "HIPAA violation". By the end of the morning I not only had a functioning computer, I had a brand new flat screen monitor to view x-rays on. It was awesome. Being married to a computer geek has definite advantages.