Working at Home

I got behind on the blog because I’ve been “working at home”.
I’ve been told I am “lucky” that I “get to” work at home. Well, yeah, but there are no employer benefits when you’re self employed. I’ve been working at home for almost five years and Greg has been working at home for 17 years. We don’t have an office in the house—it’s the entire house, which is 1,000 square feet and looks like a giant medical record repository. We don’t each have a space that we can call our very own—it is all taken over with medical records stacked here and there. We are never away from work because it is always there, right where we live, on the table where we eat, on the sofa where I sit when I watch TV, on the floor that Greg has to steer his wheelchair around. It is embarrassing or impossible to have people over as there would be no place for them to sit!
I already know most people envision that a person “working at home” is spending more time watching soap operas, sipping coffee, and chatting on the phone than actually turning out work product, or making business calls, or typing up documents. You know—“I work at home”.
I have heard what we do called “turning boxes into books”. That’s a pretty good description of a copy paper box full of medical records condensed down into the 1” of records pertinent to the case which is being reviewed by the physician. To get the box full of records down to 1”, every page has to be read to determine if it is something of value to the doctor, then put in chronological order, and indexed down the right hand side with tabs. For the most part, that is what Greg does for the doctor he works for.
And, for the most part, what I do for the doctor I work for, is take the records that have been condensed down, read all the miserable, scribbled, hand-written, illegible, abbreviated, undated notes and compose a medical record summary as I am typing. I have to read, compose, type, and turn pages all at the same time.
Now, I like computer work. But games and e-mail are 180 degrees in the other direction from sitting in one spot for hours, squinting at illegible stuff, condensing one page into one sentence, and grammatically typing it all at the same time, while you correctly spell medical terms.
On the plus side, I like setting my own schedule and not having to wait on someone else’s schedule. I like not having to drive someplace every day. I like being able to take a break and throw laundry in and out of the washer and dryer, and put something in the oven, and watch the business channel on TV, and read the on-line newspapers when I want to.
But then there are many more days and weeks like the one happening right now.
On Wednesday, I was in bed with a fever, ill with the influenza. No paid sick day. So, when I got up on Thursday, I was feeling somewhat better, and wanted to start working right away, doing something “easy”, as I was still ill. To get a quick start, I didn’t get dressed (my first mistake), and typed line item summaries of medical records while I was still in my pajamas. Then, all day long, I couldn’t take time to get dressed, so actually slopped around the house in my pajamas until I went to bed at 11:30 (my usual bedtime is 8:00). I didn’t have time to make anything to eat, but there was a quarter serving of leftover spaghetti I warmed up. Greg had to run errands in the middle of the afternoon, so I asked him to get me French toast sticks at Jack-In-The-Box; he got two tacos for himself. No time to get any fruit or vegetables prepared, no time to do laundry, no time to exercise, no time to clean, no time to even be able to drink enough fluids, no time to go outdoors for fresh air and sunshine. I mean, there was NO TIME!
After I spent more than four hours writing the line item summary, I did my next “easy” project, which took 10 hours. The medical records were on a disc. Seems like that should be a time saver, huh? Nope. There were 1499 pages of records on the disc, and I had to read all of them, decide if it was pertinent to the case, print the pages I needed, highlight the info I wanted, and put the records in chronological order so I would be able to easily see if the next records were duplicates. If I had received the actual hard copies of the records, I could have gone through them in probably two hours instead of ten hours. That was indeed the “easy” part of this record review. Today, I am writing the line item summary of the records. So far, it has taken seven hours and I’m not yet one-fourth the way through.
I’m not complaining, or at least not much. I am grateful, very grateful, that I have a job when so many others don’t. I can wear my pajamas and make tea, and eat junk food while I work. But, it is also the most physically, mentally, and emotionally demanding job I have ever done. It is not a job that is conducive to taking breaks, as you have to keep up the pace to make progress. I get all kinds of great advice from people who have never written a line item summary that I should take frequent breaks, but the work would never get done if I was taking breaks a couple times every hour; a certain momentum has to be maintained to get to the end.
So, for those of you who wish you could “work at home”, I encourage you to give it a try. Find out how great it is to balance your dinner on a stack of medical records. Feel the embarrassment of having friends over and there is literally no place to sit because every chair is covered with medical records. Try navigating a wheelchair through a maze of boxes full of records or around stacks of paper that are slipping everywhere. Work 15 hour days because your work is where you live and there is no chance to take a break, and if you don't get it done and out of the house, you will be deluged.
We don't feel like we have a home--it is just storage for other folk's medical records. And that doesn't even touch all the bad karma we are accruing by having other people's medical conditions all over our house.