The clinic that I have been in now since a week or two in July is an older clinic. It does not have wall mounted computers in each room and in fact, there is no desk at all in the exam rooms. As the temp, the other two doctors have priority over me in picking their rooms. I do not like the exam table in one room. It isn’t a regular exam table. It turns out to be a table for a DO to do adjustments. I am an MD, not a DO. The table might get switched out but it has not been yet.

Meanwhile the desk. We have laptops that plug into the desktop in the offices that we each share with a medical assistant. The desktops have a standard keyboard. The laptops are small, and my laptop that I am typing on now is in between the two. At first my fingers had trouble switching between three different keyboard sizes. Now it is pretty automatic.

So, no desk in the exam room. I do most of my note in the room and don’t dictate. I type reasonably fast. But I hate a laptop on my lap and anyhow, we are all sitting too much, so I stole one of the two Mayo trays from the procedure room. Mayo trays have adjustable height, are stainless steel so they can be cleaned after surgery, and they are a pretty good desk for a laptop. I choose to stand while typing in room one.

Next it turns out to be inconvenient to drag the Mayo tray back and forth from room one to room two. I am leaving it in room one. Room two has a standard exam table, so I pull out the “pull out leg rest” (yes, I looked up the name), push the step in and then I can sit on my stool and use the “pull out leg rest” as a desk.

The medical assistants have adjusted, mostly. The patients blink at first, but they seem fine with it. Sometimes I am attempting to find something and also attempting not to curse this particular electronic medical record. The other day I needed an ankle-brachial index test. Ok, not under ABI. Two were under ankle-brachial index. I chose the one that was not in our clinic, since we don’t do them. I got a message back that that was wrong. I chased the other doctor down. She called a third provider who remembered. The one I need is under “us ankle-brachial index”. Really? Hopefully I will remember that annoying local electronic medical record filing quirk, but I may not. If you are wondering what it is, it is a test for arterial disease in the legs, comparing blood pressure in arteries in the legs with the arms. The “us” stands for ultrasound.

The photograph is Elwha supervising on my desk at home.

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: desk.