I can now add TV star to my resume

Last week I had contacted the media outlets in our area about the story
from Florida regarding medical errors
(http://www.local6.com/news/10286256/detail.html), and told them that
if they would be interested in doing a similar story I would be happy
to provide whatever background information I could. One of the local
TV stations responded and came out yesterday to do an interview. (We
used Carol's office because it was a WHOLE lot neater, needless to
say!) The interview went fairly well, I guess, took about half an hour
altogether. They aired the story twice last night at 6 and 10 p.m.
Our small-town TV news here is pretty pathetic, quite frankly, and the
way they put the story together came out a little goofy, to me anyway,
but I did get a chance to talk about what it is we do and why it's
important. I had told them about a personal experience I had when I
had gone into our hospital for a procedure and an NP took a medical
history. Later I had occasion to get a copy of my records which showed
me as having had an appendectomy, which I most definitely had not had.
I had an "ectomy" alright, but it was in a different part of the body
for an altogether different medical reason! So I just used that as an
example of how if I went into the hospital now with flank pain, I could
potentially be in jeopardy if they looked at my records and saw that I
had had an appendectomy and ruled that out as a possible diagnosis. I
could tell the young reporterette (they ALL seem so young now!) got the
significance of that scenario, so hopefully others will too. I was
also glad that at the end of the story they made a point of advising
people to check their own medical records for accuracy. In spite of my
careful efforts to explain the CMT title and our professional title
very carefully, the caption still ended up being "Certified Medical
Transcriber." Oh well. I'll get a copy of the video and post it
online as soon as I can.

By the way, I've decided that not only does the camera supposedly add
pounds, it adds years too!

Jay

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