Like any other official staff, we often received and sent memos to the other staff at the office.
They’re written any such as, “Meeting at the hall at 11. –Boss”.
“Rewrite the consult reply of the patient’s case, send it to the Medical Record Department.”
But my favorite memo was, “Nutrition Therapy downstairs, right now.”
It means, a partner have brought us food and that moment I must help my boss to eat it all in his room, right now.
It didn’t even need twice to command me to do this, obviously my mouth and my foot reacted faster than my brain in culinary-associated commands.
What’s wrong with me, what am I talking about food?
This is the result if I’m starving at eleven p.m.
Memo should be brief, coz it’s written in punctual time, shouldn’t it?
And that’s why it must be obvious, so the receiver can do anything commanded in the memo, isn’t it? So the key is the letters in the memo.
Coz memo is seldom typed, but it’s more often hand-written.
Damn coz not everybody has readable handwriting.
So the story happened in Jogja.
A three-months-pregnanted woman came to a gynecologist complained for her vomiting.
Ya know, she wants papaya or apple or something like that.
So the doctor prescribed Sotatic for the woman.
She went to the drugstore to have the drug, and she drank it at home. What happened then?
Suddenly the woman got miscarriage.
They detected and found that the woman had drunk a medicine named Cytotec.
If you never sold any medicine, you might need to know that Cytotec is a misoprostol that able to induce a labor.
Obviously far different from Sotatic which is an antivomitus.
The fact was, the pharmacist had misread the doctor’s handwriting in the prescription, Sotatic word was read as Sitotec. Said the pharmacist, the doctor had an ugly handwriting.
Let’s move to the hospital in my town.
A pregnant woman complained for headache, sent hastily by her obstetrician to the hospital.
Too bad that the patient’s family was a little demented, forgot the referred letter from the doctor. The woman came to the emergency room, then a nurse measured her tension.
Then the nurse wrote her report on the medical record, and the doctor read the record.
Awared that the woman complained for headache, then the doctor gave an analgetic then told the woman to get home. The next day, the fetus inside the woman, died.
The gynecologist was furious coz the referred letter that he’d written hardly wasn’t brought by her dementia family.
The letter wrote, “This patient has a very high tension and must be inhospitalized right now!”
If you thought that the emergency room didn’t know that the woman had hypertension, then you’re mistaken.
The nurse who measured the tension had already known that the tension was 180/90.
But the problem was, the doctor who read the letters, thought that the number was 130/90.
The nurse had an ugly handwriting.
And please let me defend my colleague who send the patient home.
Haven’t I ever written, that as long as we considered the normal tension, we couldn’t possibly inhospitalize anyone just because she complains for headache?
I’ve told you, not everybody has a readable handwriting.
Especially doctor, whose handwriting is the ugliest of the world. I never agree about this.
I think, doctor’s handwriting is so good, especially for writing a bill, which has a lot of zero numbers behind.
But my ex-boss, also a doctor, whose handwriting was often unreadable, made me often doubt to do his command.
But it was strange that I never misread a memo associated for lunch invitations.
It seemed that my stomach and my eyes still worked synergically.
Is there often any miscommunication in your work?
I understand we have hectic work, even we’re hastened in writing, but you’ve probably gotta check your own handwriting. And I’ve done mine.
Please check my handwriting beside
, is it readable?
Coz the communication is the biggest problem in our job. Isn’t it?
