This morning, I got to take my mother to her hematologist's for another shot that's having the effect of addressing her anemia by increasing the amount of hemoglobin - the iron-rich oxygen-carrying protein in red blood cells. Her current reading is just over 11 grams per deciliter; anemic is consider to be 'less than 12' for an adult woman. As she's gotten the shots, she's felt progressively stronger, which is the goal in all of this.
The appointment came as a surprise, which should not have happened because we tend to track these things fairly closely. I've got a calendar on this PC, we have a large paper calendar in the kitchen, and (though not used too much for this kind of thing) my wife has a calendar on her work laptop. Somehow, the appointment dropped through the cracks on all of them, and the first warning we had was when my mother called upstairs to say that she'd be 'waiting in the car'. Mute consternation, followed by a quick job of getting dressed. On the way out, they scheduled her next appointment, and just as they were about to set the date, my mother said that she had something going on that day - so we changed it. Briefly, I thought that it'd be nice if we could do it electronically -- you guys check our file for available times, then zap us an email with the date; we'll get the email at home and zap it into the pc based calendar -- but I guess getting a piece of paper is just as good. Not as efficient, though.
I suppose I was in that mood because I'd been reading an issue of Fortune Small Business, about several small businesses that had had to make some rapid corrections to the way they operated in order to fix problems ranging from a sudden drop in market valuation to the need for an objective method of evaluating employees. (I particularly liked the last one, when the article said that after getting objective proof that one guy was slacking off, they 'mutually agreed' that he should leave.) It got me to thinking a little about how we track medical appointments, let alone, do medical followup. Not well, is what I think. I did have one small piece of insight: new ideas don’t necessarily come from reading listings of good ideas that someone else did. They come from applying those concepts - stretching, bending, molding them to fit a new environment. But you can't tell until you read the article if its going to have any fodder for that process.
1 comment:
It looks like "Survivor" in Corporateland.
I once worked in a business where once a quarter, the boss called the eight employees into his office one at a time and asked them what they had done to earn their paycheques. It helped me to remember to keep a notebook, a log if you will, of my accomplishments. Also, it helped me to be a self starter. No matter how humble the job, it got listed.
I worked at that burger joint for just under a year, and learned a lot from the experience.
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