If you look behind the curtain … boy howdy did I have an exhausting day. I had todays doctors visit written in my head, I mean alternate scripts. I made myself a promise not to lose my cool. I should know better than to trust promises from me. Didn’t tear the envelope but I sure rode the razor fine edge. I didn’t expect to have some of my suspicions confirmed. For the record I am not too paranoid, I’m the exact right amount of paranoid. You should never wonder if anyone is out to get you, they are, you should, however, have an educated guess as to how they are going to do it.
Hmmm, cryptic. I’m trying not to overexpose any one and also not to write several pages. The two mysteries I unveiled today was 1) there is no shrink in this whole county (or at least my intern genuinely believes that) 2) My intern is a Canadian, he’s more sympathetic to my issues with the institution of healthcare than I had imagined.
Canadian and national healthcare is not what springs to mind when your doc’s first name is Mohammad, and, for the first year, ducks any personal question, even things like ‘What’s your opinion?’ he’d quote the clinics party line. I hope when he graduates he gets to go back to Canada where the health care system doesn’t make him wince. Today I decided I liked him, he’s a running dog lackey for imperialist health care grind, but otherwise a nice guy. Today he stopped lying to me directly.
After arguing for forty minutes I got around to asking for a diagnosis for my shoulder. He asked if I had a preference for the referral to an orthopedic doc, I said ‘isn’t that what you guys do, diagnosis things like shoulders?’ he said, ‘I thought you didn’t like me. I mean us.’ I said ‘Oh, no, I just think you’re wrong, I don’t think you’re incompetent.’ I have a feeling that’s the nicest thing anyone has said to him in his internship. Because he smiled I didn’t say ‘… and I think your supervisor is an evil sadistic fuck’ So yes, even though we opened new channels of honesty, they weren’t opened that wide. I’m sure he thinks worse of his supervisor than I do, but his supervisor holds the intern future in his hands. I’d be very surprised if over the last year the supervisor didn’t offer the intern release from my case, although for the life of me I don’t know why the intern didn’t take him up on that. I suspect he thought it was a test of some kind, and maybe it was. Again, I’m just paranoid enough; I’d bet a months earnings that said alleged conversation not only happened but happens each time I’m in that office.
So, we go through all that, and after months of insisting cutting my pain killers was systemic and not related to my health care, he sort of did doc/FDA math for me (I inisisted in front of the supervisor around Christmas that it had to do with FDA changes and that son of a whore lied to my face, the intern never did that, just deflected and gave me pedantic opoid lectures). Once I got him to actually admit he’d never seen a narcotic contract written like mine (everything in it is all on me, not a single word about the clinics obligation to treat) he showed me the math and the concern is the pain killers with, what amounts, to a shit load of anti-anxiety meds. He beat around a bush or two before asking me outright whether a shrink had prescribed. I said no because for the last decade there was no shrink. I asked him if I had a shrink prescribe them and only went to the intern for painkillers … There are no shrinks. I laughed. No Shrinks. I said ‘I’ve met the people around here, they really need shrinks’. He snorted, no shrinks. I pushed hard enough for him to relent that they haven’t been able to get an open appointment with the very few shrinks in the area ever to the best of his knowledge. I told him I went into the wrong field. He had one of those moments where the camera goes all slow mo and the music swells, Oprah called them ah-ha moments, everyone else sort of calls them epiphanies, though, granted, not over a new bleach for the laundry, so, I guess Oprah needed her own word.
I think the intern would find even uglier ethics and redder red tape in shrinkology. I understand a GP’s reluctance to administer shrink drugs. Someone could have told me they were gunshy three years ago when they just carried over the health care plan from Oregon and my narcotic contract was the more standard; I don’t fuck with you and you don’t fuck with me and if any one feels fucked with we talk it out before going bat shit. That’s your standard contract for anything. The divorce rate would probably be lower if the vows were something like ‘ And, Mrs. Wifebeater, do you promise not to fuck with Mr. Wifebeater or let him fuck with you and to talk it out before going batshit, and have sex at least once a week whether anyone wants to or not? And you can love honor and cherish and all that stuff, just don’t go batshit without a talk, right?’ ‘I do your honor, I don’t even like bats, they creep me out. Can I go a little ape shit?’ ‘Don’t call me your honor, Desk Sargent McCopper will do.’
I think the nurse thought I was a bit nuts, she did all that standard shit and asked why I was there today, I went through the standard shit and said ‘and I need my shoulder looked at, hurts.’ ‘How long has it been hurting?’ ‘Seven years.’ ‘Seriously?’ ‘Yip.’
I didn’t have insurance in Oregon. The doc told me what it’d cost for an MRI. I asked what course of treatment (it’s either a fucked up rotator cuff or bursitis) He said a shot of Kennelog (well, I figured out it was kennelog years later, I thought it was cortisone. Kennelog makes more sense). When I first got a doc here, a different intern, I said my shoulder hurts. He ordered an exray of my neck. A rheumatologist hear my plaint and scheduled a surgeon to move my funny bone nerve, which, honestly made my left paw a lot less numb, but didn’t address the shoulder. The last time I saw this intern I complained about my shoulder, he said my back was ‘our’ concern. I was kind enough not to remind him of that with the whole ortho referral thing. He was either wise or kind in not asking why I hadn’t mentioned it before. I don’t expect him to remember our conversations, but, shit, that one must have haunted him. It’s like a dentist telling you ‘We dealt with your incisor we don’t have patience for your molar.’ It’s all kind of in the same mouth.
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