Personal Narrative - Reflective Commentary

“Traversing the Road of Life: There Be Detours Ahead”, is a personal narrative of my search to find myself after high school. It’s a search I will probably continue my whole life. I didn’t mention my twin sister in this narrative, but she was actually a huge reason I first went to Mackinac Island. We had been joined at the hip, metaphorically speaking, and I had also been looking for a way to become an individual. I had thought I had found meaning in 2002, when I worked on the Island, but I think I had actually just found an aspect, an interest that had been ignited from working within a restaurant. I had felt like I had found a second home in some ways with the people I met there. I have since lost touch with them and the creative energy I had felt while working there. I think this was for the best. I wasn’t really interested in opening my own restaurant, and I was getting really tired of all the late shifts.

             I should actually thank Damien for getting me into that whirlwind of emotions. He gave me an out. He gave me an excuse to leave cooking and reexamine what I wanted out of life. I sometimes miss cooking, but not enough to go back.

            Since signing up for the Health Information Technology program, I have been a little bit worried about what I will do after I graduate. This personal narrative helped me to see my choices. It also helped me to see that if I’m not happy with what I have chosen, I have gained a lot of experience in the past 10 years. Enough that there should be plenty of alternative options I could look for. I had forgotten how interested I had been with ancient civilizations. I think this would be a hard career to go into, but I will probably take a class or two just out of sheer curiosity in the next few years. And there is always the option to take trips down to the ruins in Mexico and South America.

            I had my mother edit the final draft of my personal narrative. She said that she thinks I missed sentence structure in grade school. I’m unsure of that, but it is entirely possible; I had switched to a private school in 4^th and 5^th grade and then been moved back to public school. So I took notice of this after she was done, and her improvements did make sense to me. I will need to be more aware of this in future writings.

            I have always enjoyed reading. Writing is an occasional interest to me. I think during this personal narrative process, I have learned that short sentences are better and to mind the length of paragraphs. Already, in this reflective commentary, I have been keeping an eye on both of those. As for the actual essence of the story, I’ve found that depends on how motivated I am at the time I sit down to actually write. I’ve noticed in the past that sometimes it’s better for me to get some words down on paper, and then switch to a computer to reexamine what I have written and to keep the story moving. This seems to help me not to get lost in the ocean of words. Thinking of that, I still have trouble with the sea of description and the mountain of reflection. This is one area I will need to continue working on throughout the semester.

Personal Narrative - Synthesis Draft

Traversing the Road of Life:

There be Detours Ahead

By Jessica Echternacht

After graduating from high school in 2010, I attempted college but dropped out after hardly a year. Not motivated within the career path I had practically been forced to choose. I decided to try a temporary seasonal job, cooking at a restaurant, The Yankee Rebel Tavern, on Mackinac Island, Michigan.  Mackinac Island is famous for its history and its fudge- you can’t go anywhere downtown without smelling that fudge. It’s too bad I was never very fond of it.

The island was pretty small, about 7 miles around, with a biking path that you can travel on in the space of a few hours. No cars are allowed, except emergency vehicles, so they have horse drawn carriages for the tourists, locals and employees. I can still remember going to sleep at night to the sound of horse-drawn carriages, and being awoken early in the morning by horse-drawn street cleaners, it’s definitely an ancestral feeling.

While working there I think I became reacquainted with myself. The executive chef, Matt, made a huge impression on me- it’s like he had this creative energy that surrounded him. When I left for the summer I had decided I wanted to be a cook. I loved that feeling where you get into a rhythm of making different dishes, music’s playing and there’s all this drama happening in the kitchen. When I got back to Iowa City, I reenrolled at Kirkwood in the Culinary Arts program, and graduated in 2006. 

           

Late winter, 2008, I celebrated New Year’s Eve by myself. I wasn’t inclined to socialize. Later, one of the managers I worked for would tell me that was because I was in “hibernation”. I was worn out and expected to work New Year’s Day at The Marriott Hotel. The manager I mentioned, though, was with The Brown Deer Golf Course. I had earlier agreed to pick up a few hours a week there to help with a staffing problem and they were affiliated with the Hotel.

            I liked working at the golf course more than the Hotel as they had fewer restrictions. We were allowed to listen to music while cooking and didn’t have as many VIPs walking around to assault us with their greeting expectations: one should always respond with, “I’m great”, with a huge smile- even if your aunt died the previous night.

            One morning while I was making a Hollandaise sauce at the Hotel, I was introduced to a new line cook, Damien. He later told me that my smile had drawn him in. He had recently moved up from Arizona, and was living in a small, one story house with his brother, his brother’s girlfriend and their three, very large dogs. Months later I would mentally slap myself; we dated for only a few weeks before I asked him to move in with me. I had a spare room I wasn’t using and I guess I felt sorry that he had to live under, what I thought, were suffocating conditions. I did like him, but I wouldn’t say I ever loved him. He called himself a genius, saying he passed Mensa tests and thought up inventions that could change the world. That may be so if he had the exertion to actually sit down and work on them and then actually submit them.

            In the early summer, he met up with friends he used to live with before he had moved to Arizona and had originally grown up with them in Iowa City. He had decided to move in with them. I cried and asked him if he was breaking up with me. He replied with, “no, I just need space to redefine myself”. He claimed that this would give us a chance to connect on a different level, that he would “woo” me, instead of skipping that step. We were both working at Olive Garden by then, having left the corporate confines of The Marriott behind. I still worked with Brown Deer, though. It was always difficult to leave a job that I did in fact like.

            After a couple days, it was apparent that I had walked myself into one of life’s lessons. The: “don’t be so gullible and let yourself get hurt”, one. I had made it easy to do so. It was one that I would still try to understand years later. I quit Olive Garden in a huff of indigence and humiliation, and asked for full time hours at the golf course.

            I didn’t speak with Damien again, except to see if he had taken my cat with him. That was personally the worst summer ever- the great floods of 2008 had just receded, Damien and I had broken up and my cat, Milo had fallen out a window from my third floor apartment and gone missing. I was at my wit’s end when I stopped by his place, not yet realizing that the screen in my bedroom window had fallen off, hoping that he had him. I never found my cat- which was more of a kitten; I only had him for little more than 9 months.

            I think I felt the pressure of needing Great Change. I was tired of cooking; long hours, weekend shifts, coming home smelling of grease. I had forgotten why it was I decided I wanted to cook. That or I had changed. I sifted through Want Ads, looking for possible part time jobs that might fill the need I had to do something more. I finally found one as a receptionist at the UI QuickCare, an acute walk-in clinic in Iowa City.

            This was different. I hadn’t ever worked as a receptionist before and I hardly knew how to even pick up the phone and in a chipper, yet monotone voice say, “UI QuickCare, this is Jessica. How can I help you?”

            After working with UI QuickCare for a few months, I knew I had found another calling: one that would lead me into the healthcare field. I started looking at different careers I could do within this field; I could stay as a receptionist, become an executive administrative assistant or possibly work in medical records. I chose executive administrative assistant and then backed out and enrolled at Kirkwood Community College for Health Information Technology for medical records. They put me on a waiting list and I started taking my electives. After only about 6 months I was told I had been accepted for the fall of 2010, when previously I had been told the wait list was out to 2011. I jumped at the occasion. I quit Brown Deer Golf Course, switched to full time at UI QuickCare, and registered for low full time hours at Kirkwood.

Fall 2010 was a good season. I took Anatomy and Physiology which reawakened my interests in biology. I had the chance to experience UI QuickCare on a daily basis that made me realize I did not want to be doing this all my life. Patients can be hostile when they’re sick, and in a walk-in clinic where you have 5 patients walk-in at the same time, they do not want to hear the wait time to be seen is an hour and a half. Or being scheduled to close at 7, but having a patient walk-in at 5 minutes to close so that you’re actually still there a half hour after close—in some ways, walk-in clinics are no different than working in a restaurant; we’re still open most holidays, we work weekends and we are expected to stay late.

One other passion I became reacquainted with was computers. I love all the programs, the little details within the programs, and being able to network within a facility with different software. The school program I originally signed up for right after high school had been Computer Programming. That ended up not being the right fit for me, though. But, the Electronic Medical Record is the “wave of the future”; I think they plan on implementing this nationally by 2016.

UI QuickCare turned electronic in early 2010. The receptionists, now called, Patient Service Specialists, even though we didn’t receive extra training, used to have to scan a paper visit note into the University of Iowa’s electronic medical record, which had been implemented a few years before UI QuickCare had been created. After this change, the physicians can now write their visit notes right into the computer. Most clinics in the Iowa City area don’t even need to keep the big paper medical record- I remember that as a child, the doctor would bring it in with him and check various spots and tell me, “it looks like your due for your booster shots today”, which every kid loves to hear. These days, though, most clinics have a computer right in the patient room, and the doctor uses this to view your history and make notes in. It’s more efficient and easier to find information. You never have to worry about a page being torn out and lost, or a form being placed in the wrong spot so that it’s hard to find.

I have various ideas about what I would like to do after I graduate, but I haven’t decided on specifics yet. I think I would love to work at the CDC in Atlanta, Georgia- I have checked on this. I would need some experience under my belt before I would even be considered to work there. So instead I want to get a job in the health information field, either with abstracting data, data entry or maybe release of information. I still haven’t made up my mind on the details yet. We have the Big clinical late this fall at school. I have been told after that, most students have a pretty good idea of what they want to do.

After a year or two, though, I would like to train for cancer registry. This includes extra training where I would receive a certificate when I’m done and be able to do cancer statistics at work, along with tracking of geographical outbreaks and patient treatments. This is also submitted (I believe) to the CDC. The University of Iowa actually has a cancer registry program, so I may not even need to leave the state.

After that, I’m unsure. I would like to eventually work in a federal building, or maybe public health. The one thing I really like about the career field I have chosen is that it seems very versatile; I could work in a hospital’s medical records department, or I could work in an insurance company working on diagnoses and procedures being submitted for reimbursement, or I could work in a research field tracking different diseases and doing statistics within a population or gender, or I can take what I have learned and expand into another field. I’m not interested in being a nurse, but after viewing program descriptions, apparently I’m only a few classes away from graduating with a Medical Assistant degree.

I have other ideas, fields of work that still interest me; pathology- which I may be content with in cancer registry, or I have thought of eventually learning lab technology. I think there is such a career called Ancient Diseases, or something close to it. I would probably have to also take anthropology- which does sound interesting to me. There are so many choices out there.

Either way, I have come a long way in 11 years since graduating from high school. I have gone to college 4 times now, graduated twice and hopefully graduating a second time this late spring: I also took an accelerated C.N.A. class a couple years back. I have gone through four or five jobs: and I have also worked at the Outback Steak House for a brief period, which is just a glimmer of memory in my mind. In some ways I wouldn’t be where I am today if I had never dropped out the first time and visited Mackinac Island searching to find myself.

Personal Narrative - Working Draft

Do you remember what it was like being a child? Growing up, going to preschool or kindergarten and then grade school? Or maybe you were home-schooled, I don’t know- I always thought that would be fun, but I thought that meant we would get to play all day and not have to do homework.

When we’re just children, adults ask us, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” I know that this is a question to get kids motivated about a career or a path in their life, but almost never does one child say he wants to be a policeman, actually grow up and become one. I wanted to be a zoologist, or an explorer that traveled to rainforests and examined ancient temples and artifacts. I like sci-fi, maybe if I had known the terms, “xenoarchaeology” or “xenology”, I would have wanted to be an astronaut more. These are fictional words of course; they were created in science fiction stories to explain exploring alien civilizations or alien life- but they make perfect sense to me.

Another interest I have is with diseases, I don’t really go out of my way to learn more about them, but maybe I should. I’m in the Health Information Technology program, which is basically medical records, but so much more.  HIT is responsible for organizing records, do statistics for state and federal programs, to make sure everyone in their department are following laws like the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, which includes the Privacy Act- basically so your medical information is safe and secure, and many other laws. HIT is also responsible for digging through a patient’s medical notes, assembling information on diagnoses and procedures to send to insurances for reimbursement and charges.

I first became interested in this line of work when I started working at UI QuickCare as a receptionist- they now call us “Patient Services Specialists”, but we didn’t receive any extra training, so I can’t help but laugh a little bit at the ridiculous nature of it. When I first started, I worked at the Southeast Family Care Clinic. They had after hours for the QuickCare clinic, and used paper medical records. This interested me, as the records had sections for; demographics, lab results, visit notes and many more for various different reasons. Some were teeny tiny for patients who didn’t visit often or were new, some were very thick and needed more than one record to contain all the paperwork inside.

After I had worked with QuickCare for about six or nine months, they implemented an electronic record, which means they mostly didn’t use the paper records anymore, any notes made would be typed or transcribed into an electronic format, as would lab results and everything else a paper record had kept. Around this time, they also opened the new eastside location that had full time hours, and so we stopped using the Southeast clinic, and I also became a full time staff member shortly thereafter.

Working full time there, I learned more about what it was like to work in an clinical office; we needed to scan certain paperwork into patients medical records, or print out records and fax them to patients doctors, we would need to have patients sign a Release Consent form if they wanted personal copies of their medical records, and many other small details that come with working in any clinic.

The computer program we use fascinated me at first, I wanted to know all the tricks- it took little time for me to realize that even though I had access to the program, since I was just the PSS, I wouldn’t need to learn how to make orders for procedures or need to add a lab result. But actually taking time to look around did give me an advantage from my peers at work. Some of the PSS still had issues months after training because they didn’t take the time to actually look around or click the help button if they were unsure.

I have various ideas about what I would like to do after I graduate, but I haven’t decided on specifics yet. I think I would love to work at the CDC in Atlanta, Georgia- and I have checked on this, I would need some experience under my belt before I would even be considered to work there. So instead I want to get a job in the health information field, either with abstracting, data entry or probably anything that sounds interesting, I still haven’t made up my mind. After a while, though, I would like to train for cancer registry. This includes extra training where I would receive a certificate when I’m done, and would be able to do cancer statistics at work along with tracking of population outbreaks and patient treatments, this is also submitted (I believe) to the CDC. Eventually I would like to work in a federal building, though.

Personal Narrative - Draft

I have horrible long-term memory. The only moments I can really remember from my childhood are either painful events, such as burning my hand on a cookie sheet when I was about 7 – which I still have the scar from, or events that made an impression on me, like when my fraternal twin sister, Heidi and I were down talking to imaginary people/fairies in this sort of “garden” behind a large tree in our back yard when we were about that same age or a bit younger.

            I remember camping at the Grand Canon when were small, also- but only because I awoke in the middle of the night to hear coyotes howling somewhere close by. I have splatters of memories of dragging this stuffed bear around for years when I was really small, probably 4 or 5; one day that bear went missing and I cried for at least a week before my mom and dad bought me a new one- today I wonder if it went missing on purpose so that they had to buy me a new, clean one.

            While I was growing up, my parents tried to get me interested in different sports; soccer, tennis, softball- and music; flute, piano, violin and drum lessons- as an adult I took guitar lessons, and I made it 6 months before I decided my heart wasn’t in it. 

            After high school I was pressured to take classes at Kirkwood in the Vital program, I guess it’s free the year after you graduate, but only then. Vital is like a resource class where they help you study and adjust to college. So I chose a program I was a bit interested in- Computer Programming. I made it 2 semesters before I decided I wasn’t interested enough to keep going and dropped out. That summer, though, changed my life- I decided to try a seasonal temporary job cooking at this restaurant, The Yankee Rebel Tavern, on Mackinac Island, Michigan.  Mackinac Island is famous for its history and its fudge- you couldn’t go anywhere downtown without smelling that fudge, it’s too bad I was never very fond of fudge. The island was pretty small, about 7 miles around, so they have a biking path that you can do just that in the space of a few hours, and no cars are allowed, except emergency vehicles, so they have horse drawn carriages for the tourists, locals and employees.

While working there I think I became reacquainted with myself. The executive chef, Matt, made a huge impression on me- it’s like he had this creative energy that surrounded him. When I left for the summer I had decided I wanted to be a cook. I loved that feeling where you get into a rhythm of making different dishes, music’s playing and there’s all this drama happening in the kitchen. When I got back to Iowa City, I reenrolled at Kirkwood in the Culinary Arts program, graduating in 2006. 

I cooked for a while, finally moving out by myself into an apartment in Iowa City, I had been living with Heidi up in North Liberty. A few years ago, after a, maybe not bad, but disappointing break-up, I was prompted to get another job. I decided if I was going to do that, I didn’t want two cooking jobs, so I applied as a receptionist at the local walk-in clinic, UI QuickCare. This jump-started another passion in my life, although, I didn’t realize it at the time. It took me about a year to realize I was interested in Health Information Technology; medical records. So, I quit my cooking job and went full-time at QuickCare and applied for school again, in the HIT program. I’ve continued this for about a year now, switching back to part-time at work to better concentrate on my studies. But I hope to be done May 2012.

This makes me wonder where I’ll be in 5 years… One reason I wanted to switch to health information was because it was less stressful than a kitchen and has better hours. I’d like to think that any other classes I take will be in the health industry. I really liked the science classes we had to take- come to think of it, when I had to take “Safety and Sanitation” in the Culinary Arts program, we learned about different microorganisms, this was one of my favorite classes.

I guess we never know where we end up, even after all the planning or adjustments life makes for us.

Learning Log I

Learning Log:

Soldiers Stories – Dispatches from Iraq

I reread these stories and wanted to remark on a few that struck out to me. I had mentioned that I don’t pay much attention to the news, at least, not as much as I used to, I’ve become pretty busy in the past couple years:

            In Captain Ryan Kelly’s letter I realized that it’s easy to forget about the people who are fighting the war. I could say the same thing about each letter, but in his, the descriptions’ of his fellow soldiers characterizes so many different types of people from different parts of the U.S. and one foreigner, and that was just one side of the story. It would be very interesting to read the same account, but from the Iraq soldiers.

            In Commander Edward Jewell, MD’s letter, he mentions that they were supposed to receive 20-30 new patients but didn’t [on day expected] because of the weather – that’s hard for me to imagine. I could see how that may be so during the dead of winter in a blizzard; that’s probably because I’m not accustomed to thinking of a hospital on a boat that may have sea storms and other miscellaneous weather issues.  I could see, however, how it would be very practical to have a ship that can easily move everyone and their equipment at a moment’s notice during times of war.

            The paragraph about him going up on deck during the “darkened ship” status was very easy for me to imagine, because of his vivid description and his wording of it having an “impressionist” feel. This set the tone, and as he described what he had seen and heard, it was easy to forget that he was actually in a war zone and it was easy to forget that the darkened ship status was for safety issues and not for some sort of romantic setting.

            Sergent Timothy Gaestel’s paragraph about the female lieutenant pulling off his clothes and inserting a catheter was humorous to me – he hadn’t seen a female in a long while, and when he does, she inserts a catheter! I can imagine this would be a bit painful or uncomfortable, and certainly not what he may have imagined when seeing a female after this absence.

            When he was sent down to the patient hold, I would think it may be a bit traumatic seeing all the injured patients with appendages missing and battle injuries, that with the combined combat memories that Captain Lisa Blackman writes about. He writes about what he sees and that it’s like out of a movie, but I think it would have a surreal feel to it, too; I could imagine the hospital smell mixed with the other patients’ anxiety and fear along with the noise of equipment and soldiers’ sounds made this even more so. He also writes about wanting to rejoin his unit as soon as he can, this struck me as being very loyal, which is one of the reasons why I think he deserved the Purple Heart in Loyalty; he must have been very close to his unit and I would think very dedicated to the United States’ cause to want to hurry back into the war.

           

            During last weeks’ class, someone had mentioned how the hospital ship, Comfort, had been a place they must have felt safe. I don’t think that is true at all; they may have been a non-combat ship, but they were still in a war zone and vulnerable enough for attacks that they had to send out helos to run off unknown ships and go to their “darkened ship” status to hide from enemy fire. They also took on prisoners of war, who were probably scared and thought that they may be killed or separated from their families.  The Iraqis’ could also possible attack them – Commander Edward Jewell had mentioned that he often forgot this since he was a doctor and they his patients, and that there had been a known terrorist on board. We would hope they would honor the rules of warfare by not attacking medical units, but this does not always happen or accidents may happen.