LOM TEST FILES

INTRO_T1

Dear Medical Transcription Student:

Welcome to the exciting and vitally important career of medical transcription.  I hope that you will maintain an eager interest and excitement about your course of study.  Soon, you will begin to experience the fascination and appreciation for medicine that working medical transcriptionists have come to enjoy.  Because medicine is ever changing and because people and their problems are never boring, I can assure you that you will be always learning and interested in your work.

Medical transcription is both an exacting science and an artistic accomplishment.  It is important to have a combination of skills including spelling, proofreading, knowledge of medical terminology, and typing; and a firm background in English grammar, structure, and style.  The successful medical transcriptionist has both accuracy and speed; a broad knowledge of anatomy; and a thorough knowledge of medical, surgical, drug, and laboratory terms.  In addition, it is important to know how to use standard medical and nonmedical reference materials.

An exciting career as a medical transcriptionist awaits you. I wish you the best for the future.

Sincerely,

INTRO_T2

CRITICISM

Criticism first became a subject for conversation in my life about 21 years ago when I went to work for a prominent thoracic and cardiovascular surgeon.  During the course of the interview, he asked me if I were able to take criticism gracefully.  Well, I was stumped.  No one had ever asked before.  They had just handed it out, and I really did not know how gracefully I had accepted what I had had so far.  It depended on who was dishing it out, I guess.  I thought about my response, worrying that my prospective job somehow hinged on what I had to say one way or the other.  I felt he would have liked for me to say something like “Oh, I love criticism,” or even “I never need it!”  Evidently I gave the right answer, however (he did hire me), when I replied, “Well, I guess we’ll have to find out, won’t we?”  This answer implied to him that he would hire me, and that we would both see how his criticism and my acceptance of it went along.

But I was now on the alert.  I was forewarned that criticism was, in fact, a big possibility, and I worked very hard against the day when “we” would find out how gracefully I could accept it.

I really did not know where it would come from.  There were a lot of possibilities; the day seemed fraught with them.

That was just the first day.

By the second day, I found out.  That was the day my first transcripts were returned.  Large permanent blue-black ink circles covered the many carefully prepared documents.  It was hard to be graceful when I looked at the ruination of a half-day’s labors (actually, half a night, too, as I had spent long hours at home researching unfamiliar words).

We had weeks of that, and I was getting discouraged; still graceful, I presume, but discouraged.  The errors were becoming fewer and fewer, but that did not seem to help much, since I wanted them to disappear.  It was harder and harder to face upto them somehow.  Now that I was feeling more secure in the job, grace was wearing thin.  He never said anything.  I never said anything.  I just retyped.  A lot.

Now 2 things happened.  The surgeon’s wife came into the office on Saturday morning when he proofread and busily marked up my work.  She watched, appalled.  Monday morning shortly after I arrived for work, she called “to see how you’re taking it.”  “Fine,” I said.  She was relieved and reported that she had talked to him about it, feeling that he had been too harsh.  “Well, she won’t learn if I don’t teach her, and she’s worth teaching.”  I learned about grace that day.  He took his precious time to teach and to help me.  He had a BS in journalism and knew his Greek and Latin roots to a fine degree as well.  I was pretty much humbled by his constant criticism, his love of perfection, and his belief in my potential for growth.

All of our lives we are both subjected to and the dispensers of criticism.  If we can remember to accept it with the spirit in which it is given, realizing it took some time to critique our performance, and that it was done because of our ultimate potential, we then must accept it not only with grace but with thanks.  Secondly, we must try to remember to give our criticism only with graciousness, knowing that we can help someone in whom we see the potential for personal or professional betterment, and not criticize to showcase our own skills.  If we cannot criticize fairly, with love, and in private, then we need to withhold it.

This is a lifelong relationship, us and criticism.  We never should feel we have outgrown the need.  If we protect ourselves by not doing anything new anymore, sticking to only what we do perfectly, then we will no longer grow in grace and wisdom.