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I spent part of my morning creating two 12×12 scrapbook pages focusing on the first house my husband and I lived in.  We lived in Hudson, MI in a house provided by my husband’s work.  It was a really nice house, and, as I sat scrapping the pages, I remembered so many different wonderful things.

I thought about our first Christmas.  We had very little to spend on gifts and yet I still have and use items I got that year.  I saw a picture of the first birthday cake I made for my husband - it was a snowman.  There are lots of memories. 

The man who built the house was a brick mason so we had the neatest stone work in the living room and kitchen, unlike anything I’ve ever seen before.  And the downstairs, wow!  When you walked down the basement steps there was a bit of a hallway and the wall on the right was made to look like the front of an old western town saloon.  There were “bars” (dow rods painted black) over the real windows that looked into the room and there were swinging doors that you had to walk through to enter the room.  It’s so hard to explain and unfortunately I never did take pictures of that particular room.  With my scrapping today I was really wishing for some!

Yes, our first home looked really neat!  There are times I wish I could move back there and let my boys play in that house.  As I think back though, I remember some not quite so fun things.  I remember the lack of AC on hot days.  I remember the fun electrical mix ups that seem to come with every house.

You see, this house was not very high tech.  We were doing good to have lights, they may not have had dimmer switches, but they were lights.  I remember one of the lights.  It took us forever to learn how to turn it on.  There were three light switches controlling that light so it shouldn’t have been a problem.  The only thing was, all three of those switches had to be in a certain position in order for that light to work.  If one was down instead of up, no lights!

There was no home automation.  There was no Protector Plus Home Security System to keep us safe.  There were no wirless remote controls to anything other than the garage door.  You know what though?  It didn’t matter.  My husband and I were together and that’s all that really matters.  We were as happy as larks.  We could have been in a one room apartment with an airmattress and we would have been happy.

Those are the memories I like to scrap.  There aren’t any pictures of light switches, AC units or security systems.  The pictures on my pages are the ones that bring back good memories, memories that I want to share with my family.  They’re memories of happy times.

My best friend is in the process of selling her medical transcription business and since times are economically tough, I thought I would look into this venture and see if it was worth my while to invest in it. Having had almost no experience whatsoever in this line of work, I paid my friend a visit to see the process in live action. She was gracious enough to take me step by step through each little detail from how she actually got the business in the first place to the very end product that she hand delivers to each doctor’s office.

One would never have thought that such a task could be so labor intensive and tedious. There were certain forms she used that were specific to patients and/or doctors. Then there was the listening and comprehension part. That can be a challenge at best with a normal American English speaking doctor but try understanding a doctor who has a Pakistani accent or a Chinese accent and you’ve just compounded your problems. Throw in some of those strange doctor words and along with that mile long pharmaceutical words and you’ve got yourself some alphabet soup mixed up with some ear jam. That will send your brain into a tizzy quickly.

My friend quickly recognized that glazed deer in the headlights look I had the first time I tried it. While laughing at me, my dear friend told me how to reverse the tape back so that I could listen to it again. There’s also a neat little button that will slow down the tape speed to something that could possibly be understood with an English linguist translator. I had to ask her how she managed to even comprehend that Indian dude who was a general practitioner, because there was no way I would have even begun to guess that he had spoken a word of English.

After a while of letting me struggle at it (and laughing at me the whole time), my friend introduced me to her dictionary. This is a computer file that she has created that lists out most of the common pharmaceuticals that the doctors prescribe. Great, I thought. That should solve most of my problems, until I realized that I can’t even recognize the first letter of that drug in order to look it up. She whipped out a cute little purple customized flash drive and loaded it up with the dictionary. She handed me a tape and made me sware to bring it back to her along with the transcribing machine that she lent me. “Go have fun and give it a whirl. Send me your files and I’ll review them.”

I went home and plugged in that preloaded flash drive. She had purchased bulk USB flash drives with the business logo on it and telephone number and had given a lot of them out as corporate Christmas gifts to the doctors’ offices that she serves. The key drive had the dictionary and the various forms already loaded on it and I was soon on my way to learning how to listen a whole different way. After many hours of struggling thru one tape, I loaded up the transcriptions that I had completed on that cute USB flash drive and gave it back to her with the firm answer of “No, this business is not for me. Thanks.”

Even though modern techniques like laser cutting allow precision cutting and the least pain possible, surgery is still often a painful ordeal and one that takes a good bit of time to recover from. Especially major surgery like having a joint replaced. Unfortunately, growing older often makes it necessary to replace body parts that only last so long after thousands upon thousands of times walking, running, lifting, moving your joints over and over. But thankful prosthetic shoulder blades, kneecaps, and hip joints are available now that work almost as well as the real thing.

If you’ve ever had surgery, you know that even the time leading up to the all-important day of the hospital visit can be nerve-wracking. You’re thinking about how much pain you might have to endure, how much could go wrong, how long it will take to recover. What if your body doesn’t recognize the prosthetic hipbone? What if the doctor doesn’t attach it in the proper way? Mulling over what could go wrong only adds unnecessary stress to an already stressful time on your body. It’s important to stay busy and focus on your life now—work, family, etc.

Finally the day comes. You walk into the hospital room, surrounded by men and women wearing sterile green coats, plastic caps, masks, and latex gloves. You lie down on the bed, and a nurse inserts an IV. Pretty soon everything fades away and you go into dreamworld (or a no-dreamworld sound sleep).

You wake up and the procedure’s all done. Right now you can’t feel anything because of the anesthetic, but you know that pretty soon you’ll be feeling your body adjusting to its new joint every time you lift your leg, every time you take a step.

Unfortunately, the human body sometimes does reject prosthetic implants. That’s one reason that prosthetic medical parts must be completely sterile and free from any foreign particles. Manufacturers of medical implants place their products in wire baskets, which then enter an intense cleaning process that removes any dust or other tiny particles that taint the surface of the medical part.

Three M Tool, a company based in York, PA, manufactures custom baskets for all kinds of industries. They will make a basket according to the shape, size, and materials a customer wants. For a medical industry, they will make a basket the right height to hold a prosthetic implant and choose a mesh size that holds the parts firmly yet allows chemicals to flow freely through to clean parts.

After surgery, you can be thankful every time you take a step for an accurately manufactured, clean prosthetic hip that your body readily accepts. Even if it’s not quite the real bone you had before, it’s a great alternative, and better than no alternative.

Yes, stainless steel baskets truly are a great tool for ensuring sanitation and quality control. Three M Tool’s products to help ensure that medical manufacturing produces the highest quality.

Three M Tool can be contacted by calling 800.309.0671.