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Truly Depressing!!! Frustrating!!!

Posted By: Sneaser on 2008-07-03
In Reply to:

I know I have posted before....thanks to all those that have given me leads.....but I am so depressed....have applied at too numerous-to-count companies....and STILL no MT job!!!!! Have some medical background besides my MT diploma, yet cannot get anywhere!!!! Even bought a foot pedal.....how is one supposed to get experience if no one will mentor them....and I have applied to all mentoring openings.....but no responses!!!! I JUST WANT TO CRY!!!! Seriously thinkiing that this was a big mistake.....wanted to further my career....but this hasn't helped!!!!  And unfortunately, I cannot afford to take another MT course......sorry to post again....I just needed to vent.....so miserable!!!!    Sneaser


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depressing
Thank you for the info.  I guess I'll just have to make a few more shortcuts and see how that pans out.  I do have an Expander -- one -- that holds my "gazillion" shortcuts already but it is provided by the hospital I work for and is the only one that has to be used for ALL accounts.  Thanks for your insight.
depressing changes in MT
wow. if what you say is so (about the AAMT, that is), reminds me of the so-called "nurses' associations." they spew about being "advocates for nurses," and at the same time, endorse every bit of legislative evil you can imagine to undermine our practice and...well, let's just put it this way: there's no shortage of nurses; they're just not at the bed-side--they're fed up with the codswallop. just wish nurses would get as much "stuffs" as you all evidently have!
Its depressing!
I have an oncology acct,  I think its so sad   
Depressing pay
What bums me out is reading all of the posts of people claiming up to 100,000/yr doing medical transcription. I just cannot fathom how that is possible, but then again, I am an employee with accounts that change frequently and the beginnings of CTS. Good for all you that are able to really profit from this line of work. I cannot wait to move to an area where I can utilize my education.
Depressing reports
Anyone ever get depressed after typing certain reports? I sometimes find that abuse reports on kids will bring me down and I have to get up and do something else for a little while. Does anyone else have this problem sometimes?
depressing reports
Thank you so much. I thought I was the only only one who sat and cried at the keyboard!
Wish I had not looked. Too depressing. nm
nm
This is depressing, especially about Spheris. nm
xx
Happy yet depressing, too!
Man, sometimes life just stinks! My current job has not had much work for me lately, so I've been testing around to see if I can scare up more work. I've been really down on myself, it seems like no one hires newbies. I've got just 10 months part-time experience, some clinic, some acute care.

I just got results back from the first company I tested with. I just scored a 98.8%! YAY!! The company doesn't have any openings right now though. I've never been so happy to NOT get work in my whole life. ACCCKKK!!

How do y'all handle this emotional rollercoaster?
Depressing News
I lost my hospital job back in September. I don't know what state you live in, but I'm an MT and here in Michigan I was able to get unemployment benefits. I would suggest you apply; the least they can do is say no. Incidentally, I was out of work for nearly eight weeks and last week started working for a company in New England. I've found them to be very friendly and helpful and the pay is pretty good. Good luck in your search. I know it can be discouraging but please don't give up.
This is severely sad and depressing. sm
Sounds like I retired just in time, before our profession started going totally down the tubes. Actually, I believe it already was on its way down really more than three years ago. We all worked so long and hard to build ourselves up to professional standing and recognition--not to mention decent pay because we're worth it--only to end up as factory girls again. I hate that.
Seriously? Must be a big secret. I find it very depressing and
very difficult.  New terms constantly and staging, etc., are written differently
Depressing news today
Well.  My hospital job was outsourced in August and I also had a PT job to help pay bills too.  Today I found out that I will no longer have that PT job as that I was working PT for has decided to put all MTs in one pool to work at all of their hospitals they own, so the Outsource Co I have worked for four years has lost that contract basically.  Another financial loss.  I was making bringing home about $2300 a month and now I am down to about $900 a month or less.    What a blow.  Jobs are so scarce now and I just cannot go to Walmart to get a job because I had major back surgery years ago and I just cannot stand lor long periods of time.  I do not know if I would even qualify for unemployment benefits which is so little but it would pay credit cards maybe.   I have not heard really of MTs qualifying for unemployment and I am not so sure about this either.  I am going to check into it, but I doubt.    My MT friend where we used to work had to borrow $30 yesterday to buy a couple of groceries.  She bought food to make chilli and Hamburber Helper to last for days.  I hope things turn around, but at this point I am not so sure.  So depressing and I am tired of taking typing tests.  I have been an MT for 29 years and score really high on tests, but then a person never hears back from those companies.  Just how depressing is that and I know that a lot of us have been there, done that.   Have resumes in everywhere I can think.  Lets all hope and pray hard for things to turn around in this next year. 
Depressing News followup

My PT job was at a hospital that used Meditech so I do have that training on that software, but I have worked via the Internet for years with a couple of diff hospitals so thank God I did have that experience in other software programs and knowledge of Internet.  


Meditech is not a MT friendly  program either but I did make good money so now I am going to have to find another PT job to help the gap.  I sure am going to miss that account.   I have been so lost since I lost my hourly paying hospital job and going back to working by the line for my total paycheck and I hate it.  I really have thought about going back to school at age 58 and doing medical billing maybe.  Hope it improves for all but I really do not think it will for a long long time. 


 


ophthalmology and cardio; psych is depressing but not that hard.
nm
That must be so frustrating! sm

I've only purchased brand new units (around $200), but they only last a year or a little more for me.  I think they make the darned machines with too many plastic parts and they just don't last.


I don't think I'd trust buying a used one without some sort of guarantee.


Sorry - hope things get better!


very frustrating
I was not aware that the MQ levels were based on number of lines typed. The email I got differentiated the levels by work types.
its frustrating but all you can do is
report it to your mgmt. they have the power to stop it if they want to.
How frustrating is this?
   I have a NP who is dictating.  She calls the patient by his first name, calls him by his first part of hyphenated last name, calls him the last name of the hyphenated last name (i.e.  Mr. John Smith-Jones is sometimes John, somes Mr. Smith, sometimes Mr. Jones).  What a BIG pain for this verbatim account.  "uj" usually gives me the patient's name, now I can't use that because she keeps changing her mind what she wants to call him..................grrrrr.
it is frustrating
It's a little easier for me now because the kids are older, but what I try to do is get up early before everyone else and get a good 2-3 hours in. This works for me because I'm a morning person. If you're not, maybe you could work at night? I know it is tough - you just have to shut yourself in, close the door and become unavailable to the rest of the world !
I can see where it would be frustrating...

I am an MT who also takes frequent breaks to rest my hands and my back.  My daily production is pretty good, but my production per hour would not really impress anyone.


Perhaps you could suggest modifying the report to contain just daily production.  I do not see where productivity per hour or some of those other items are pertinent to anyone else because there are people who will shoot out anything to get a line count and there are those who are gifted at typing 100 wpm, neither of which I can/will do.


It is frustrating for sure...sm
I used to work in-house with a lady that was a cherrypicker. There was one hard dictator that she said "I can't do his and it takes me too much time." Well, it took the rest of us a lot of time and frustration also to do his, but we did it. She was allowed to get away with it because she was good friends with the supervisor. Needless to say, all the other MTs left (except her) and they couldn't find anyone to work there and stay, so now their transcription is sent out to be done. The cherrypicker is stuck there doing whatever anyone hands her to do now. Serves her right!
very frustrating.
I actually just put medical transcription in the search box and came up with 4 pages of videos all foreign. Yikes.
Oh that would be frustrating.

It's not just you. The job is especially frustrating
when the dictations are horrible. Let's see, today I've got speedy spit chick, the um um um um um um um um um um um chick, the old guy with gas who constantly loses his train of thought, and the two foreigners.
How frustrating
and sad. OT, but I would have loved the opportunity to get out of the Northeast cold!
It's very frustrating trying to access
This qualifies for the Stupid Business Decisions award.
It is very frustrating when your pay is determined

by your output and you can't produce with the dictators.  It does get easier and I can do them fairly well know, but I do some really, really bad ones - heavy accents, mumblers, can't pronounce words, etc. and even though I can get through them without any blanks it is VERY frustrating, especially when you have several of them at a time. 


Some of the dictators I have now I can fly through, but the first time I had them I was ready to quit because I left lots of blanks and I just don't leave blanks.  I can't believe I ever thought they were hard because they are so easy now.  You have to train your ears.  Give yourself a couple of weeks and if it doesn't get better ask for another account or start looking.  Every company is going to have some bad dictators, ESL or otherwise, but doing 10% and doing 90% is a big difference.


Good luck - hope it gets better.


It was very frustrating to learn but

after 3 months, I have grown to like it.... well maybe I have grown not to dislike it so much.  I would still rather work in MS Word.  It is NOT the best platform out there to be certain.  The spell check is awful and I copy everything into a Word document to double check.  You cannot copy back into Emdat though.  If there are any changes to make you must type them.  For some reason if you copy from Word, although it looks okay to you, on the physician's end it is wrong.


It is nice not to have to worry about the line count.  It is VERY nice not to have to save each patient separately.  It is nice to have the patients name available (although that is not always the case).  Overall, I give it a C. 


Hope this helped.


The same things happens to me...so frustrating

I have to manually right click and delete all of the extra smart lines.  I've had it to where I have so many smart lines that I only have a couple of inches at the top of my screen to type in.  It happens more some times than others.  It happens whether I'm working in straight Word or ExText Word. I find that if I log out of Word and back in, I can get it to stop happening for awhile, but that is so time consuming, especially if I'm logged in to ExText.  I've looked on all of the boards for a solution but haven't found one yet.   


Yes, it gets so frustrating when trying to work
and having to shut down because of a storm. I recently started with a new company and had to explain the quirky weather around here so they wouldn't think I was just slacking off...lol. But, they are very understanding about it, but it drives me nuts!
This happened to me too - it was SO frustrating! SM
I found that I had a lot of Spyware on my computer that was bogging everything down, and that was causing my ShortHand to work VERY slowly. So when I typed out my abbreviations, it would print out the abbreviation followed a couple of beats later by the whole phrase, know what I mean? It was a huge problem. I ran Spybot (free) and it fixed the problem, but not before my production was drastically decreased and I ended up having to give up one account because the majority of the phrases I used on it were in my shorthand and I just couldn't keep up. Good luck, and I hope this helps!
Frustrating on both sides
You are absolutely correct about the hyphens - if the linked words form an adjective followed by a noun, they are hyphenated.  I know it's frustrating to have undereducated QA people, and as a QA person, it's equally frustrating to have people who absolutely never hyphenate, put a comma after every 2 words (or none at all), etc.  I really really hate when MTs start a sentence with "patient comes in......" when the doctor clearly states "THE patient....".....that drives me insane! I had a report the other night where I had to add "the" 27 times!  It's amazing how many people do not understand proper punctuation usage, adjectives, verbs, etc.  I certainly wish I had more like you who know where they go!
Yes I tried it many times. This is so frustrating. nm
:
Yes, it is frustrating when trying to converse with people
who don't understand English.
Oh golly, that must be frustrating and annoying.
maybe you can make a game for yourself of second-guessing the QA folks. It sounds like they are the kind of ill-informed people who would rather cling to their ignorance like grim death than open their minds and learn something useful. If you look at figuring out their foibles as a game, maybe it won't rankle so much.
I would agree they are slow and frustrating
but once you have them down you can make great line counts on them.

As a side note, I have been doing ops daily for 10 years and I still use my Stedman Medical and Surgical Equipment word book often. If you are going to dive into ops you must, must, must get this book before starting. It will help you a lot.
How frustrating! Maybe you could offer to charge them half price, but
I would not let them get away with taking advantage of you. I know you need the job, but it's not fair for them to expect you to spend all that time (especially over a holiday weekend) and effort for nothing. Offering to only charge them half price at least gives you something for your time and also offers them a break. It was their mistake - not yours but halfing it with them will hopefully show them that they are willing to work with them on it but also let them know you're not a push-over that they can take advantage of.

Good luck!