Catchy Name Needed

Added I would like to note that I got the quiz afterwards (which earns you an extra CEU credit if you pass) 100% right on the first try, and all three of those items (i.e., "bladder botox" and the two bullet-point items) were on it. So I owe my stellar grade partly to the time I spent typing all that out!

We are home from Dallas (again). I have to say the drive seems much shorter with some company. I think Rob enjoyed the trip, too, so that's good. I took my test, and I basically have no idea if I passed or not. I might have or might not have - I did a good bit of educated guessing, here and there, and it all depends on how well I guessed! If not, then I do this again later, although hopefully I'll be able to do it without another trip to Dallas, because I am very tired of that drive.

What with the intervening holidays and all, I don't know when I'll find out if I passed or not - sometime the end of next week, maybe. Before that, I have another job interview - for an OB/Gyn coding job, this time. I think that might be a very interesting job.

Oh, I did get over being sick in time for the test, thank goodness. I was still sucking on cough drops the whole time, but at least I wasn't sneezing and hacking and all that. Wednesday morning I was still feeling bad enough that I briefly considered trying to reschedule, but I really, really wanted to get it over with, and happily, it all worked out.

We went to the grocery store on the way home this afternoon, and oh my god, it was a zoo. Now we are home watching Doctor Who specials, and I am very happy to be here. I've spent so much time running around in the last week that home feels like a giant treat.

Happy new year, y'all!

I'm just now starting to get interested in Christmas music this year - this is late for me compared to past years. I've been adding holiday stuff to my iTunes queue for a while, but up til now I'd been deleting it every time it came up, unless it was "River" which is my favorite sort-of-Christmas song of all time, or maybe something like A Charlie Brown Christmas. But tonight I have been letting some other stuff sneak in.

And it's December 10th11th so I suppose it's time. Yike - Christmas is two weeks away? How did that happen? I mailed exactly four cards today. I do have some outdoor decorations up but not the tree, still. We went and bought a tree so I feel obliged to actually put the damn thing up, now. And gee, holidays or studying? I already let Thanksgiving interfere mightily with the study schedule and now I'm sure I will end up having the same problem with Christmas. (I'm already thinking, maybe I'll go to Ikea tomorrow...) Shit.

I am more interested in school than I was during the first half of the coding class - which isn't really saying much because the first half of this class was boring as hell - but I'm still really having trouble making myself concentrate. I'm almost wondering if an offline class might not have been a better choice. If I could even have found such a thing, I don't know. I know there were some Medical Terminology classes because I did check that out way back when I started this, but I didn't check again when it came time for coding. I really doubt that there are many CPC-H classes going in Houston right now. (CPC-H = certified professional coder, hospital. It's coding for outpatient surgeries, primarily. It's not as popular as the regular CPC class which emphasizes coding for doctors' offices.) Anyway, as Col pointed out when I was whining about this the other day, I'm probably learning this more thoroughly by going slower, but if I keep going slower and slower, as seems to be the trend lately, I'm never going to finish. Like the event horizon in a black hole - you never quite get there.


In case anybody was waiting with bated breath to know, here are the codes for H1N1:
CPT 90470, which is for administration of the vaccine
and there are two HCPCS Lvl II codes:
G9141 - admin
G9142 - vaccine

(Trust me, if you need to know what a CPT or HCPCS code is, you already know. Maybe some other day I'll attempt to explain that, but not today. Of course, if you really needed to know the H1N1 code, you probably would already know that, too.)


OK, time to go study some before bed. (Uh-huh. In 10 minutes I'll still be looking at Facebook or something. You can bet on it.)

Have I mentioned that Col and I are playing WoW again? Well, we are. We were trying to finish Northrend before our memberships expired, but I don't think we're quite going to make it. I'm enjoying it enough that I volunteered to pay for another month, though. That should be plenty of time, near as I can tell. We're most of the way finished with Scolazar Basin (I don't think that's spelled right, but you get the idea) and we've already finished Zul'Drak, so all that's left is Storm Peaks and Icecrown. We are level 80 (woot!) and we both have Explorer titles and I even sprung for a fast mount (4000g for the training. Whew.). Then we're going back to LOTRO when that's finished.

I am about to take my midterm in the coding class. I should be studying right now, actually.

There are a whoppin' 5 items in the Etsy store now. (A couple more may be coming sometime tomorrow.)

Rob's movie report: He went to see The Fourth Kind this afternoon, the alien-abduction movie. He seemed to like it, although he didn't really have a whole lot to say about it. (He did make some comment about whether the "documentary" part of it was fake, at which I tried not to roll my eyes too obviously. Which could be why he didn't say much more about it.)

Oh, we are overloaded with invitations for Thanksgiving - my aunt, my sister, and my dad have all invited us. Daddy was third so he's getting left out, but we are going to try to make two stops on Thanksgiving Day and go to both Bryan and Austin. That should be doable. My sister has another significant other that she thinks is serious - more so than the last one, I hope! - and she's all anxious for us to meet him. Should be interesting.

I am awash (mentally) in diagnosis codes. I'm starting to get the hang of it, but it's a slow process. I am learning to resist the temptation to keep running back to look in the textbook for every question I have - most of the answers are right in the code book in the first place; after all, that's what it's for.

Because I'm compelled for some reason to catalog the catalogs, we've gotten more in the past few days:
Franklin Covey (that one followed me from my old job)
Angela Moore (painted jewelry)
Blair (grandma clothes, from which I occasionally order some of the hopefully least grandma-ish clothing)
Acorn (heavy on the PBS DVDs - seems to me I used to get a catalog with very, very similar merchandise called "Signals," so I don't know if they changed their name with unfortunate timing, or what.)

Also, do y'all get those mailers every week with the grocery ads and such in them? I'm not sure if that's just a suburban thing or not - I don't think we got them regularly in Galveston. Well, anyway, this week's batch had a Party City catalog in it that I just loved - it had little pictures of all the Halloween costumes, divided up into, y'know, Boys, Girls, Men, Women, Infants, Toddlers, even plus sizes. Not that I'm intending to buy any, but, I dunno, cheesy Halloween costumes make me happy, for some reason. And that reminds me that I saw somewhere that more people are intending to make their own costumes this year. Which may not be the best thing for the economy, but it's sort of cool.

(Col and I had a conversation the other night along similar lines about Christmas - he was wondering if people are starting to decommercialize Christmas due to the economic conditions. Once again, I am torn - it's a good thing, but then again, not really good for the economy. At least not all at once. Also I suspect a bounce-back effect at some point if people get too drastic about it.)

I found a list that I was compiling somewhere along the line, so for your entertainment, I give you:


This is not near complete, but it gives you a few of them.

Meanwhile I have finally plowed my way through the last chapter of the anatomy book, so all I have to do is review and I'm done there. Meanwhile, I have also started working on the coding material. The second chapter of coding is a review of anatomy and terminology, so maybe I can overlap those and use it to study for my anatomy final!

Another nugget of medical history from my anatomy textbook:

I knew about the relationship between "hysterectomy" and "hysterics" - if I hadn't, it was pointed out in my Medical Terminology book as well - but what I hadn't heard before was the part about the indignant wandering womb. (However, the Greeks also believed that the arteries carried air, so it's not that their medical knowledge was otherwise all that sophisticated, in any case.)

edema
abnormal collection of fluid, usually causing swelling


I'm sure a lot of people know this word, but I'm putting it in here anyway because it lets me discuss the mechanisms of edema a little bit, and I thought it was interesting. I like this definition (from the anatomy book) better than the one from the medical terminology book, which was worded the other way around - something on the order of "swelling, usually caused by abnormal collection of fluid in the tissues". The excess fluid arises on a microscopic level, in the interstitium between the capillaries and the cells. Normally the capillaries take out the same volume of fluid that they bring in, keeping things in balance, but when things get out of whack the fluid builds up in the interstitial space and eventually becomes noticeable as swelling. One example the book gave was hypoalbuminemia - a lack of albumin, which is a protein, in the blood. The presence of the proteins in the capillaries - in some mysterious way that I don't entirely understand - draws water back in with them, so a lack of proteins means more water stays in the interstitium.

OK, the page is sort of swimming so I think that means it's my bedtime. Hope this makes a reasonable amount of sense!

I joked to Rob that I am like those annoying commercials for that Microsoft Bing! or whatever it's called - where people start spewing all that random information on a certain keyword. Only mine's not really random, and of course I hope to god I'm not that annoying about it! But I'm full of all this newly-acquired information these days, and I'm dying to share. Where I am Bing-like is that if you say, oh, Parkinson's disease, you elicit an immediate brain-dump - I really did do that one the other day, but it was only Art, and he's increasingly deaf these days and won't wear his hearing aid, so I don't know that he even heard it. -- Which reminds me, Col asked for a brain-dump about nerves and I haven't gotten around to doing that one yet, so if I'm really as gung-ho as I say, I ought to get on the stick, shouldn't I?

The next chapters in Anatomy were two subjects that were at the end of the other book - the senses and the endocrine system - and so I am sort of sick of them and I decided to skip them for now. I will come back to them later. The next chapters were the one on blood (thus the "buffy coat" term the other night) and the one on fluid regulation, which didn't have its own chapter in Med Terminology. Something new, yay! (And blood is a very complicated subject so I certainly needed a refresher there.)

(I am tempted to talk about Michael Jackson or LOTRO but I think I will go study instead. The former subject, in particular, does not need any more input. I had to turn MSNBC off because they have abandoned politics for the evening in favor of 24-hr King of Pop, and it was making me nuts.)

I just took the final. I hadn't really studied as much as I intended to, but I made a 99, so oh well. My average for the whole class was 98.5.

I started to put "sorta" after the "Done!" in the title, because I can't really take any time off to celebrate - I took too darn long getting through this thing. Now I need to go through the rest of Anatomy fast, and never mind if I don't make an A because it's not actually required anyway. (If I hadn't already paid for it I'd be tempted to skip it entirely.)