Go Live or Go Home...and by the way Happy Halloween!

Our hospital has been working on the transition from paper medical records to electronic medical records for over a year and a half, and our GO LIVE! date was October 31. I was part of a group of employees appointed to be in charge of building the computer applications specific to our hospital's needs, and for training those who would be using the computers (basically everyone). We had to attend many classes, and between those classes we had much building to do. Everything that was being documented on paper needed a designated place to be documented in the computer system. Think of Microsoft Office. You know, there is Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook. Well, the program we are using has applications like that for medical people to use...only instead of four of them, there are about twenty-five of them. There is an application for lab, radiology, emergency room, operating room, registration, clinical care, therapeutic reporting, resource scheduling...to name a few.

So the project was massive. Many hours underground in the basement training room were involved, and many hours trying to catch up on our regular jobs that we had neglected so we could work on the project. The bottom line is, GO LIVE! was on Halloween, and so was the kids' costume parade at school. One of the hardest things about trying to balance career and motherhood is a day like this. I feel a little bit like a failure when I miss something that is a big deal to my kids. My mom was always there for everything. Always. I guess I wanted my kids to be able to say that.

But there is an upside. While it does not hold true hospital wide, the GO LIVE! went really well for me and my department. I saw tears, I heard profanity, and I witnessed my coworkers flocking to the coffee and Halloween candy. Not so much in Cardiac Rehab. Everything I needed to do for my patients worked like it was supposed to and it was easy and exciting! Yay! (I did not spread it around too much, though, because I did not want anyone at work to be tempted to beat me up!)

I had a small epiphany at home as well. I really didn't miss anything vitally important. As is our tradition, we trick-or-treated as a family on the eve of Halloween (it's the way Halloween has always been done in our tiny town). While I was not one of the classroom party moms this time, Madison took cupcakes to school for movie day with orange and black sprinkles. And we carved pumpkins. My hope is that they will remember the trick-or-treating. And the cupcakes and the pumpkins. My hope is that the one little parade when I wasn't there will fall right off of their radar. I mean, if you look closely, they don't really look traumatized, do they?