Tag Archives: Quimper Peninsula

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Rebel in clinic

Right before my hospital district informed me that they no longer wanted my services, I was rebelling. The fight from my perspective, was over good patient care. They had set a quota. 18 patients a day. One every 20 minutes and one 40 minute visit. 8 am to noon and 1 pm to 5. I argued and argued and argued. I knew finishing the note in the room took me 25 minutes on the hateful electronic medical record and I had averaged 16 patients a day my whole career. I was not fast but I was super thorough and had just gotten an excellent report on a chart review and had been told that I was a great diagnostician. Which was mostly due to my nearly OCD thoroughness. I was not diplomatic with the hospital administration.

One day I was feeling wicked, just wicked. I had a brainstorm and started whistling softly. The other two doctors and PA were all in the same small office.

One took the bait. “What is that? I know that song.”

“Oh, we are singing it in chorus. For some reason it is in my head today.” So I sang this song.

I did not have the words memorized. I swear that the temperature in the room dropped and the male doctors hunched in their chairs.

“Yeah, don’t know why that one keeps playing in my head.” I said. “I hope you can all come to the concert!”

But answer came there none.

I took the photograph at Quimper Family Medicine, the clinic I opened after the hospital clinic kicked me out. The skeleton was named Mordechai in a contest. This is from 2014. Mordechai lived in our waiting room every October, with different outfits.

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Getting rid of stuff

This is not my forte. I was raised by pack rats and I have genes from both sides. My OCD tendencies are confined to patient charts and keeping shoes in their original shoe boxes. Otherwise my house is piler pack rat. Piler, not filer. Filing is boring. My office managers have to be Queen Filers to keep me in line. Both of them were, too.

Cleaning out the clinic was difficult. I found stuff I didn’t know I had, of course. What to do with the metal speculums? Keep for posterity or in case we run out of oil? I don’t actually know where the speculums went, they went off with a friend who is helping.

In retrospect, I think my mother would have made paper mache ducks with speculums as beaks and wish I’d kept one. Ah, well.

Weird shelves, microwave and printer.

Someone bought the weird shelves. The microwave’s owner picked it up. We had three printers running at any one time except when one would die and we’d only have two. This printer went home with me. New and old computers went home with me because one has to wreck the hard drive because HIPAA. My house currently looks like a computer/printer/scanner/file cabinet graveyard. It’s annoying.

Home office guest bedroom.

Besides this messy room, there are also 8-10 more boxes of stuff moved down to the basement. I have to keep patient charts for ten years or until they are 21 for minors. I have paid a company Big Bucks to take that over. I have to keep business records for 7-10 years depending on if it’s state or feds.

Well, I’ll sort it before I’m dead, or else my kids will.

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Quimper

Q is for Quimper in the Blogging from A to Z Challange.

I live on the Quimper Peninsula in Jefferson County, Washington, USA. The Quimper Peninsula is a small peninsula jutting up from the northeastern corner of the Olympic Peninsula. So, a peninsula attached to a bigger peninsula.

We are surrounded by water. When I first moved here I was confused. I am from the east coast of the US. So, the ocean was to the east. Here on the west coast it is west: except that where I live, the Salish Sea is north and east and south. The Quimper Peninsula runs southwest to northeast and ends at a lighthouse. I can stand on the beach at the lighthouse and look over the Salish Sea and see mountains. It took me a while to get oriented, because I can see the Olympic Mountains looking over the water or the Cascades: Mount Baker, Glacier, Tahoma.

The Quimper Peninsula is named after Manuel Quimper, a Peruvian born Spanish explorer and cartographer. He contributed to the charting of the Strait of Juan de Fuca in the late 1700s. Until I wrote this post, I had not read about him.

Our thin rural phone book for Port Townsend and Port Ludlow lists five Quimper named businesses:

The Quimper Inn, a bed and breakfast. Our town had a boom in the 1860s-1880s and the architecture is still here. There are wonderful old houses and downtown.

Quimper Mercantile, a community started and owned store.

Quimper Sound, a quite fabulous local music store, albums and CDs.

Quimper Unitarian Universalist Fellowship, a church.

And lastly: Quimper Family Medicine, my family practice clinic!