Sat, July 19, 2008 (11:50am)
I had a great day at work, yesterday. Despite having injured my shoulder a few days ago, it wasn't too sore getting up in the morning, and I was able to get done all the mundane housework which I'd been putting off for the last couple of days. Stuff like vacuuming is really difficult to do with a ripped shoulder, ya know? And in the mid-afternoon, Shades came home early from his work so I could go to my other job. (The clinic here in Sherwood Park had let go of a nurse, and I'm covering some shifts for her over the next couple weeks.) I refamiliarized myself with the clinic pretty quickly, was working with a very cool doctor, and even managed to coach them thru an interesting problem: X-rays on CD.
The local X-ray labs have been slowly going computerized, and as such they no longer give patients their X-ray films to bring back to the doctors for viewing. They now give the patients a CD with a copy of their X-ray images on it. Our clinic in Edmonton has been doing this for a couple weeks now, but Sherwood Park hadn't been.
Until now.
We had a patient come in and hand us a CD, and everyone at work looked like a deer caught in headlights. "What do we do?" "How are we supposed to put these on the X-ray viewer?" "When did they start this??" "Who's going to tell the doctor about this?" So I stepped up and said I'd deal with it. I asked the doctor if she'd ever dealt with X-rays on CD before (she hadn't) and reassured her the CD comes with viewing software, and all we'd have to do is put it in a disk drive and the pics would automatically come up.
So of course, having said that, things were bound to go wrong.
We put the CD in, and it asked what we wanted to use to open the files.
Hm. No viewing software included.
I left the doctor staring at the screen while I went to call the X-ray lab, and ask them what was up. Apparently the folks at the X-ray lab were also kinda new to this X-rays on CD thing, having only started it today, and they had forgotten to burn the program onto the CD with the X-rays. They assured me they'd re-burn the CD and have someone courrier it over.
So I took that news back to the doctor, who was unimpressed, but agreed there was nothing much we could do. She told the patients they would have to wait, and they too were unimpressed. The doctor moved on to other patients, and I was left with a CD of un-viewable pictures.
Instead of taking it out of the drive, I sat down and mucked around with it a bit. The X-rays were pretty simple images, so I looked around on the doctor's computer for other software which could be used to view images. (sigh) Nothing good: no image manipulation software, not even a simple image viewer. But... it had Internet Explorer! So I dragged the X-ray onto IE, and lo and behold... they were viewable on-screen. Not great, and no options for zooming or changing contrast, but it was better than nothing.
The doctor came back, and was quite pleased that we could now see the X-rays. She pronounced the picture quality sufficient for the task at hand, and finished consulting with the patients. They were happy, and left with a prescription about half an hour before the courrier arrived with the new CD.
The rest of the staff in the clinic just stood aroun in awe: "You fixed her computer?" "You madethe X-rays work?" "Wow, we're sure lucky you're here tonight!" I tried to explain that it was really nothing, but considering that some of the receptionists had to be trained how to use a mouse when the office went computerized, I suppose a little bit of technical know-how goes a long way.
Things quieted down not long after, and by 8pm we had no patients in the clinic. The doctor decided to close up early, and I was home before Shades and the kids got back from dinner at Uncle Hugh's place. I managed to finish a bit of cleaning (mopping the $*%!! floors) and had the house sparkling clean by the time they arrived home. Not bad, eh? TWO jobs accomplished with flying colours!
To wrap the night up nicely, Shades and I watched Dr. Horrible's Sing-along Blog, the new Joss Whedon project which will only be online for the next 24 hours. GO WATCH IT NOW if you want to see a hilarious SuperVillian muscial! It will be taken down on July 20th. (Disclaimer: It's not the best piece of work Joss Whedon has ever done, and may suffer some feminist critique, but it's got Nathan Fillion playing the part of Chauvenistic SuperHero, Captain Hammer, and that makes up for a LOT!)
That's all for now. I re-injured my arm last night (grrr. And um, don't ask. It involved SuperVillains) so I'm going to take some more Robax and head of to Fort edmonton Park with Shades and the kids, for some Summer fun.
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