It’s o’dark thirty at night and I’m tired, going to turn in shortly.
This will be a short week for me. I applied for and was given Thursday off. Trying to decide now whether I want to visit the dentist Thursday or a GP. At the moment I’m leaning toward a GP. I am sick and tired of the arthritis and while a GP can’t fix it, he/she can give me the documentation to get a handicap plate for the car, which would be a Godsend.
G and I were talking today about an event next weekend at the museum in the Big City nearby. I would dearly love to go. I simply know I can’t do it physically. Not possible, not happening, not unless I cave and go in a wheelchair, which I don’t have.
If I get an honest doctor (yeah, I know that’s an oxymoron) I suspect he or she will diagnose some pretty significant physical issues. More likely I’ll get a doctor who listens just long enough to stifle a yawn, documents that I’m faking everything and pushes me out the door. That’s been my previous experience. I keep holding out hope for an improvement, and who knows? I’m overdue for a miracle, maybe this will be it.
That’s the most tragic element of America’s health care, more even than a lack of insurance. A professional “documents” something, it’s taken as gospel truth, whether or not there’s anything true about it. It’s frustrating and almost as debilitating as the initial problem. When you get some asshole with an M.D. who decrees you’re a hypochondriac (or worse,) it’s a stigma that never goes away, regardless that it was the doctor’s negligence involved and not a lack of illness.
My kids’ dad was a real dick, and for many years of his life he sought any and every excuse to dodge responsibility. He was a drug addict and a general all-around louse, but he legitimately DID have a heart attack in his early thirties. Trouble was that the doctor blew him off completely, and did so on several occasions before finally caving in to my then ex’s angry second wife. The hospital finally did a blood test – whereupon they discovered telltale heart tissues running through his veins, an undeniable sign of a heart attack. The same medical community did the same thing with an infection that had developed in my ex’s body when he had gall bladder surgery in the mid 80’s. It took several years later and a second wife who was an R.N. to get anyone from the medical community to pay attention. By that point there was a pocket of infection the size of a football. It was amazing that alone didn’t kill him.
The second wife developed a kidney problem during her pregnancy. You’d have thought the assholes doctors would’ve figured by then it might be worth their license to do what they were supposed to do, but nooooo. Second Wife finally arranged, on her own, to drive 100 miles to another hospital. There in the E.R. they told her had she arrived 24 hours later they couldn’t have done anything to save her life – or her baby’s.
As you may begin to suspect by now, I harbor precious little respect for the medical community. Doctors all too often take the view that their college degree grants them omnipotence: all-seeing, all-knowing, infallible knowledge and ability. Thank God my daughter had the temerity to tell one physician outright that he might have a degree, but he’d never lived inside her body so he’d better damned well not tell her nothing was wrong with it.
Unfortunately the medical community has the stranglehold on medical care. We have no choice but to rely on their expertise to make us well. So we have to deal with the local doctor’s superiority complex and find whatever means we can to puncture it, at least for long enough to get an accurate diagnosis and appropriate treatment.
In case you’re wondering, the above experiences are just the tip of the iceberg. I once had a problem with crimson corneas and the sensation that my eyelids were lined with sandpaper. Hauled my butt in to the E.R. with what I assumed was Pinkeye. Having never had pinkeye before, I didn’t know that my symptoms were atypical for the disease, so I was fully expecting the prescription for what everyone figured was the problem.
Only after a week, the condition had deteriorated significantly and I went to urgent care, where I reported additional symptoms. The physician on duty completely ignored the new symptoms I described and announced that I was allergic to the meds they originally had prescribed. After changing prescriptions the problem was again worse within just a few days. I lost my vision, for all intents and purposes, enough so that I had to have my underage kid drive me to the doctor’s office.
Only then did a physician finally listen to what I had been saying since day one. I wasn’t even sent home; I walked directly across the street to a specialist who, after a brief exam, sat back stunned. I had, as one opthamologist later put it, struck the lottery in terms of ocular ailments. I had a combination of two separate and rare syndromes, with no apparent cause for either. The cause was never established, though by the process of elimination it was pretty much decided that I must have been exposed to something toxic.
My illness began when my then-employer moved us to another building. A few months later, a portion of the ceiling collapsed and more than 180 people developed physical symptoms in response to the “perfectly safe” environment. It was too much even for that company to completely dismiss, though of course since my original ailment cropped up before the collapse, no one was willing to consider that I was reacting to the same toxins. In fact, a couple of months after the incident, anyone still exhibiting symptoms was arbitrarily fired. I think the most common reason for dismissal was absence, which of course was in response to the toxic environment. Go figure.
Where did the medical community fall in all this? One doctor had the integrity to tell his patients that the company had directly intervened and directed him not to excuse anyone from work for any reason. So regardless of the legitimacy of your illness, you would be told to quit faking and get back to work. Of course this being Arizona, a so-called “Right to Work” state, the company was never held accountable for what was tantamount to racketeering.
Who needs the mob when you’ve got Big Business?
I suppose in all fairness it wasn’t up to the doctors, at least not in that situation. Unfortunately those circumstances didn’t follow other, comparable situations of doctor negligence. I know there are some physicians out there who legitimately try to do a good job, don’t get me wrong. I’ve known some of them personally. But those are few and far between and even they are often “managed” by the insurance regime.
You might assume I’m in favor of socialized medicine. I am ambivalent, truth be told. In theory a national health care system is the only answer. In reality, I fear it will only exacerbate the mafia mentality already in place. After all, once the transition is complete the shakedown will come from the Federal Government.