It’s going to take me awhile to get used to this.  I left my computer at work.  I don’t have anything I have to do tonight for work.  I just resisted the temptation to check my work email at home.  No need to worry about it until tomorrow now.

For six years I have worked in home health, which meant I had documentation to do once I got home.  It is a noble work, that I can say for sure.  Seeing patients in their homes was the most satisfying work of my physical therapy career. One-on-one is a therapist’s dream in a world of managed care and dwindling compensation, where tag-teaming patients is the norm.  I loved going into homes to see my patients.  Their world was opened up to me, whether it was a hoarder’s home or a neat freak’s home or a multimillion dollar home or a slum home.  I’ve been in them all over the years.

Once I left the home the work was not over however.  Talking to the family when they got home from work about how it went, what they can do to help, researching equipment, thinking about plans for next session.  No matter how long one is in this business, it never gets cookie cutter, at least not for me, at least not in geriatrics.  There are so many variables when treating geriatrics that one-size-fits-all therapy is never the way.  Even if I did finish my paperwork, I’d be thinking about a problem as I tried to drift off to sleep.  What if that rude son is there again?  How am I going to explain to Mr. Jones that his wife really cannot progress any further and I must discharge her as is?  Endless questions.  Endless emotion.  Endless stress.

The end of the day would find me lugging my work into the house, not sure whether I would do it that night or the next morning before starting all over again on the road.  The picayune requirements for Medicare now take up so much time – fax this, email that, document every every everything.   “If it’s not documented it didn’t happen.”  This is a direct result not of a desire for better patient care, but of a litiginous society. That’s a subject for another blog. (I love it when a computer program underlines a word like litiginous as if it is spelled incorrectly.  Yes, there really is a word ‘litiginous.’ Dumbing down, indeed.)

But today, I walked into the house.  I placed my purse on one hook, my keys on another, placed the two folders of exercise sheets that I won’t be needing on my PT shelf and came up to play on my computer – when I finish here I will be pulling up recordings of last week’s choral rehearsal and instructions for the little knitted chickie Easter egg covers.  Best of all, when my brain goes into “work” mode I just have to remind it – not tonight, dear.