Not My Degree

SO the mother had finished everything except her comprehensive examinations for her masters degree before her vision problems started. She put off the comps at first for the same reason most anyone would: Because she could.

Then retinopathy started messing with her vision and she was delaying the examination in the hopes that her vision would improve enough first. Now the time has almost passed and she made arrangements with her university to do the examination orally over the phone with her professors.

The thing is she can't see to read the questions or prepare her answers so the task basically falls to me. The old man has been badgering me now on a daily basis to find articles online to read to the mother. I am the one who is suppose to research these questions. When I try to get some input from the mother I can see that she really doesn't want to be bothered. She knows there is very little chance she will ever be able to practice as a nurse again or even use her degree in some other capacity. She will not admit that she doesn't want to take the test.

I'm frustrated because she doesn't seem to retain anything I read to her and I've been forced to read reports from the IOM which are the most buzz word inflated pieces of mendacity I've ever been forced to work with.

I can look back to every time I've dropped out of school (That is three times) and I know that every time I mentally hit a wall when it came to pointlessly preparing make do work about things I didn't care about that had little to no relevance to anything anyone would ever discuss with me again. Yes please let me discuss the symbolism of the forest in a play by Shakespeare because these plays that were written to be performed on a stage before an audience really out to by nit picked as a piece of literature. Or perhaps we can discuss the theme of loss as it applies to three unrelated books. Can we jump up and down for joy over the literary stereotypes of seventeenth century British literature and how heavily it relied on images from what civilization. ARRRRGH.

And the thing is I like literature. I love to read. I can discus the collective works of William Gibson and how its roots are really in the writing of the writers we refer to as the beats rather than in science fiction. (though there are a few SF writers whose works came before his that had similar beginnings). I can connect the dots between Dylan Thomas and Kenneth Rexroth and Allen Ginsberg and Charles buckowski. I like it. I love it I want some more of it.

Don't show my a Quality report or whole system approach. I will rave and scream and cry. Please pleas don't try to Dialogue with me and when talking about ones ability to carry out functions as a person never ever refer to it as bandwidth. If there is Shaming and blaming to be done it should be with any and all who lend their communicative technical expertise to quality initiatives and workplace culture.

If you want to see why I'm screaming just check out this report or maybe just the executive summary.

Maybe later I'll realize that this is about the quality of health care and I'll want scream some more about that.

Mind Frazzled