Sorry, but that song has been stuck in MY head all day, so obviously, the only solution was tto stick it in yours.
Anyhow, on to the reportage.
Did the ol, Wound Care thing this morning. 10 am appointment, which is fine.
Any earlier than that, I get a little cranky.
My nurse was interesting. She came across as a total bimb at first, which made me nervous, but she was a pro and knew what she was doing.
Just maybe a tiny bit ditzy around the edges.
In my defense, the last bimbo type nurse I encountered was that brain case who fucked up inerting my IV over and over again, to the point where she worse out my considerable patience and forbearance and I ended up roaring at her.
Probably scared the poor girl shitless but there’s only so much stabbing (and then wiggling the needle around) a fella can take.
You gotta know when you’re in over your head, toots.
Anyhow, usually the setup is that I sit down on the exam table and put my foot up on a stool (of medicine!)) and we go from there.
But this lady suggested I lay down on said exam table and she could work on my feet with me in a much more relaxed position.
And I thought, that sounds interesting, so we tried it.
And I loved it! It was way more comfortable than the usual way. For both of us, I think, because she could raise the exam table to a level where my feet were easy to reach.
So I think I am going to suggest that from now on. It was so much better!
Also had a chat over the phone with Doctor Chao. Told him about my crippling back pain earlier in the week, which I am glad to say has mostly disappeared.
It’s still there, but it’s only mildly uncomfortable now I can feel the stiffness in that area of my back (roughly the middle) when I stand up or lean over, but compared to the brutal grinding agony I felt earlier in this week, it’s nothing.
I did some stretching and I think that helped. And with back pain and me, the idea that the source is ultimately digestive is always in play, although that usual causes back pain way further down my body, in the lumbar region.
But Doc Chao suggested it could also be some kind of inflammation, and if so, I dunno WTF. I can’t think of any particular trigger for inflammation in my diet recently.
There’s always rogue infections, I guess.
I am going to keep an eye on the situation and see if it gets worse again. The fact that it’s still there, lurking, makes me nervous. It could flare up again and this time, I think I would have to take it to the ER.
Oh, or Urgent Care if it happens to happen between 9 am and 10 am. Pff.
I dunno, maybe things are less insane over there now that the second Urgent Care place has opened in the east side of Richmond.
All I know is that the place over on 3 Road has severely unimpressed me and it will take some time and some reliable testimony to the contrary before I will trust it again.
Especially since, as sad as this is, the ER at Richmond Hospital is now comfortably familiar to me.
Over the last couple years, it’s practically become a second home to me.
If things get worse, I will start to know the staff there on a first name basis.
I already recognize some of them from other visits when I am there.
It’s only a matter of time.
This makes me so happy
Every time I watch it, I feel better about life.
The former gifted child
I love this lady’s work.
I was a gifted child – now a gifted adult – but hers is a keener story and I was a coaster.
Keeners work hard, get great grades, go on to great success.
Coasters like me did absolutely no work, coasted by on natural intellect, and end up crashing and burning.
I oversimplify, of course. A lot of keeners crash and burn due to the goddamned stress, too. Some of my former keener classmates went that way.
And that makes me sad.
But I have always wished we had some kind of testing like the GCSEs or the SATs here in Canada because I would have done amazingly well on them and would then have had official proof of just how god damned smart I am.
A selfish desire, granted. Would have been good for me but not so good for the majority of other folks. I would imagine.
My sister Catherine is more like the lady who does those videos. A hyper competitive keener haunted by a fear of failure so intense it would cause her to have huge emotional breakdowns on a regular basis when she was in college.
Her marks were better than mine. But at what cost?
But now she’s way up in the hierarchy of Statistics Canada and jets around the world to hobnob with the hoi polloi and live in Washington DC in a really swank neighborhood and basically be mega successful.
So I guess it all worked out for her.
But I still don’t know if it was worth it. What she went through to get there scared the hell out of me and made me terribly worried about her for more than a decade.
I worried that one day we would get a phone call telling us that she had suffered a total breakdown and was in a psych ward somewhere.
I can’t imagine having that kind of “ambition”. Even at my most smug and arrogant, I would still have taken my good marks for granted because it cost me so little effort to get them. All I had to do is show up.
If someone had told me that I was supposed to be getting scholarships and such, I would have gone for it.
But nobody told me jack shit about anything. I grew up with no expectations of me of any sort at all.
They would have to notice me and think about me and care about me for that.
So I just did whatever was easiest, and coasted.
Now I wish I had tried harder purely to prove how smart I am. That is the sort of motivation I can get behind.
50 years old and only now do I realize I crave excellence.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.
Bonus content! Extra story!
So I get this phone call this morning telling me that I had apparently missed my appointment with a urologist at VGH.
First I’d heard of it. Last thing I remember was the ER doc telling me that he was referring me to a urologist after my last “peeing blood” incident. In early March.
Maybe they called and told me, maybe not. Either way, it never ended up on the calendar so we were not there.
Then the secretary starts going into this spiel about how they have a no show fee of $100 that I will have to pay before the doctor will agree to…
And I interrupt her right there to say, “Then you will never see me again. ”
This completely catches her off guard. She tries to resume her spiel and I interrupt against and tell her that I am on a fixed income and can’t pay the fee.
She rallies and goes into the spiel again, and this time I let her rattle on til she reaches a natural stopping point, then say, “Then I’m a ghost. I’m a shadow. I’m gone. ” and hung up on her.
They’ve tried to pull this shit on me before and my response was the same, although I am quite proud of how assertively I handled it today.
And what I realized afterwards is that if they had not brought up that bullshit fee, the doctor would have gotten my business anyhow, but now he gets jack shit.
Nice policy ya got there, doc!
I guess most people don’t realize they have a choice or feel so guilty about missing the appointment that they pay up to atone.
But I live on around $1350/month. Ergo $100 is around 7.5 percent of my monthly income. That would be like a regular, employed person losing 7.5 percent off of TWO of their paychecks, at least.
And they don’t live in nearly as narrow a margin as I do.
So fuck them. I’m a ghost. I’m vision, I’m the shadow of smoke.
And fuck YOU.
This has been today’s bonus content.