Interns in the Mist in Normal entries

Healthcare clusterduck today. Oh, not trying to be coy, GF’s phone auto-corrects to the politest when it’s not being entirely revisionist, mine does just the opposite. I’ve gotten used to typing clusterduck, it was funny to me a while back, now it’s habit. There was an album in the seventies by … I don’t remember some hair band or butt rockers — named something like What were once habits are now vices or vice versa, and maybe I should start editing but, you know, duck me.
All weekend I was blaming Trump and I still think Trump killed Christ, caused the black Plague and conspired to put Stalin in office in post-revolutionary USSR. Turns out, however, he didn’t have shit to do with my healthcare clusterduck; same stupidity, different vessel. Hmmm, equally stupid in a different way, vastly different vessel.

For one thing they lost another attending physician of mine and passed on the first several opportunities to inform me. They only told me when hostilities reached a fever pique and they were all defensive. That wouldn’t be worth the digital ink except they’ve been doing this all month. If I asked who won the world series they’d either let me know about the 1928 series or tell me that it hasn’t been played yet in a snotty font.

It took several well-crafted mean and annoying portals mails from me to get shit sorted. When I was being polite (I know, hard to imagine, right?) I was getting Bolshevik (hard to believe that’s what a smartphone got out of bullshit) with snarky little have a nice day’s. If you’ve never been to the Midwest but heard the folks were polite and stoic, well, that’s true, nothing more passive aggressive than a polite fuck you followed by a have a nice day.

My records are all fucked up too, a subject I haven’t yet broached said fuckery with those corksmokers (I just made that one up, it’s kind of fun playing What Would GF’s Phone Say) for two primary reasons 1) Had more immediate concerns and 2) HIPA never sat right with me, if my medical records are visible to any developmentally challenged twelve-year-old with rudimentary hacking skills, I’d just as soon they weren’t accurate. Some of the missing pieces seem less than accidental, most notably the medical marijuana card. The explanation of which, a year and a half later, in it’s most direct and solid form would sound like a pile of Bolsheviks. It’s missing from care summaries that I know once held them as I had to take Urine tests, I even asked permission to seek a medical card (regular docs don’t do that here, either by design or attitude, I don’t know, but there are several clinics that do nothing but medical marijuana cards).

Part of the clusterduck, a good chunk of it, had to do with having my meds withheld until I took a urine test. They waited until Friday afternoon to tell me, right before they closed for the week, with my medication due on Saturday. Again, I started off polite and slid into righteous indignation and then into legal speak and ethics. Not hardcore legal speak, but just a bit over the email nurses head. She suggested I go to my primary. Um, she answers the emails for my primary. I worded that email in such a way that, I think, she would have been a bit afraid not to pass it on. Within minutes things were resolved. A three to five day wait turned into a fifteen-minute wait and the information that the person I addressed the email to no longer worked for said institution.

I abandoned this Bolshevik because my pharmacy texted to say I had prescriptions to pick up. This town does road construction in the summer when the students are mostly gone. The road from here to the pharmacy had been down to two lanes like a gauntlet of metallic death, so I have the pharmacies app on my phone and CPU and tablet and laptop. I checked to make sure it was the right prescription, and, my afternoon luck had the road opened and freshly paved and beautiful. Everything went so smoothly I forgot about this entry. I am told it is important to bear little regret for this world. And whereas I have more regrets than a little, none have to do with not getting back to this nonsense quickly. Even so, it’s been less than 24 hours. I would have forgotten about it altogether if my computer hadn’t booted up with the message that a word document had been saved.

It’s an old habit from early on at OD; create in word because OD could crash at any given moment. It’s not that these things are pearls of wisdom I want to pass on to the ages, but, if one is going to do this shit at all the commitment should be sincere. I have at least ninety-nine reasons why I do this shit at all. They are primarily excuses. Early on I liked the idea of instant feedback. I’m not writing stuff that needs feedback now. I used to write fiction and on OD in the bad old days folks weren’t that polite so there wasn’t that whole sycophant dynamic that there is on, say, Facebook. Even the youngsters and the not-so-bright learned the phrase ad hominem in those days. The not-so-polite remarks weren’t really critiques so much as unfiltered hostility.

So, I’m pretty happy with how things turned out but I anticipate more clusterducking next week. It’s ok, I have the upper hand now. I implied that I was impugning their integrity and implied that they were practicing defensive medicine and not patient orientated care. Someone had a guilty conscious. My righteous indignation was at least 51 percent effective and 79 percent sincere. Ok, there is nothing I could add to this pig with a makeover that’d make it more appealing, though I did go beyond just putting lipstick on it. I kind of like pigs.