Dispassionite

Yesterday I went to a Medicare coding seminar. For those of you who are not medical experts such as myself, Medicare has codes for everything. They have codes for illnesses, diseases, etc, and they have codes for the treatment of those illnesses....procedure codes, if you will. Well, I thought that's about as far as it went. Boy, was I wrong.

I sat in this meeting for three hours along with thirty women who have been in medical billing for anywhere from five to twenty-eight years. The presenter kept using overhead after overhead detailing codes for everything from the musculosketal system to the endocrine system to the female reproductive system. Then, we went over what they call "CPT" codes, which are the codes that you use when treating the specific thing that's wrong. Up until that point, I was feeling pretty good, thinking, "Man, I've got his HANDLED."

It was then that they pulled out even more acronyms that meant absolutely nothing to me. I continued to sit there, doodling, breathing loudly, and trying to think of a way I could get around the table to get another chocolate chip cookie. Meanwhile, there were questions flying from all over the room about HIVA's, and TRT's, and SNIF's.

At one point, the presenter said that she used to sit in bed at night and try to figure out payment schedules. Then she said that she loved coding and teaching coding more than life itself.

That comments made me think what I was passionate about for the remaining 45 minutes of code training. And what did I come up with? I am passionate about exactly NOTHING. There are things that I like to do, things that I think are important, etc. However, I have never had a job that I wanted to stay at forever because I LOVED it, I have no hobbies that I dream about all the time, and nothing that I would die if I wasn't allowed to do. Mostly I just want to be fat and happy, never having to think about anything very much. Perhaps that's what I'm passionate about....fatness.