Dr. Lawrence Curry, DO update

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This was kind of an annoying week; I spent way more time than I usually want to trying to get people to call me back who were manifestly refusing to do what I wanted. I’m trying to give people money to mow my dad’s lawn and no one wants money. I tried to cancel a doctor’s appointment, discovered I could book an appointment but not cancel an appointment online, called and was told by a recording to leave a message, and no one called me back. I left messages with various denizens of the city I live in for various other reasons. Very little luck.

So, Dr. Curry. I went back on the 31st and checked his office out again. This is its current condition:

That’s taken through the window, which gives you a sense of the current security level of the office and how guaranteed it is to be broken into by someone looking for drugs in the very near future. I took more pictures, but all of the rest would require some level of image manipulation to hide people’s names and addresses and shit, because there are documents with people’s Social Security numbers on them sitting in the windowsill.

While I was standing in the lot, another car pulled in. It turned out that the driver was the mother of another of his patients, one who also had spent time trying to convince their family member to stop going to this guy. Unfortunately, her daughter in this case is not only on Medicaid, which makes it difficult to just pick up and switch doctors, but she’s also on a thyroid medication that she can’t currently get her prescription renewed for. Because no one can get ahold of this fucker.

Again, this situation is literally going to end up killing someone. He has a lot of elderly and Medicaid patients. (This makes the “no insurance/$50 a visit” thing on his door even worse– if you’re on Medicaid, it’s because you don’t have fifty bucks to toss at the doctor every time you go.)

I found an article from several years ago that suggested that at that time he had “over 6,000” patients, by the way.

I went to the nearest pharmacy, just for the hell of it, and they told me that as far as they knew he was still practicing but that his hours were limited to “between six and eight in the morning.” I told the pharmacist that the lobby had been cleared out and she seemed surprised by that; apparently they’ve seen him relatively recently, so I very well might just drive over there at seven on Monday and camp out in the parking lot for a little while and see if anyone happens to drive by.

Dr. Curry also had an FNP working for him. She has also disappeared. She’s considerably younger, so I have to assume she’s going to turn up somewhere with another job? I’m still trying to find her. She’s got privileges with a hospital south of me but it’s not like you can call those hospitals and find those people; that’s not how it works.

I also called the local newspaper and a couple of lawyers. One called me back and explained that he couldn’t help me. One has not. The newspaper guy called me back and said he was treating the situation as an action line situation, where they just help out readers with shit, but that he was looking into things and would get back to me if he found anything out. I haven’t heard back yet, which I’m choosing to not treat as sinister just yet.

We’ll see what Monday morning has in store for me.

Have you seen this man?

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So this asshole here has been my parents’ primary care physician for, more or less, my entire life, and was my doctor during the time when I had no choice in the matter as well. His name is Dr. Lawrence Curry, and you can damn sure bet that I want Google to pick up on the fact that I’m using the name Dr. Lawrence Curry of the McKinley Medical Clinic a whole lot in this piece, because I am pissed.

I’ve never liked Dr. Lawrence Curry, D.O.; his receptionists are rude, he clearly doesn’t have time for his patients (oh, you wait, if you think that’s an unfair thing to say) and he consistently overbooks so that you are guaranteed a multiple hour wait any time you set foot in his smelly, dirty office, which will be playing vaguely racist black and white comedies the entire time you’re there on a tiny and yet incredibly loud TV in the corner. But I’ve never mentioned him here, at least not by name, although I think I might have bitched about the TV show that was playing in Dr. Lawrence Curry, D.O’s office the last time I was in there without actually using his name.

I saw my dad yesterday, and he asked me for my doctor’s name and phone number. This surprised me; as I said, I’ve been trying to get him to change doctors for forever with no luck. I asked what happened, and he said something curious– that the office wasn’t answering the phone any longer. Which is … kinda weird for a doctor’s office, even Dr. Lawrence Curry, D.O.’s, right? So I called the number on their typo-ridden, shitty website, and it’s disconnected.

Huh.

I had to go see Dad today for something unrelated, so I decided to hell with it, I’m curious, and I swung by the office. Not a car in the parking lot. This was on the front door:

Fuckin’ classy, eh? Apparently dude doesn’t have access to a printer. Note also that today is May 30th, which is relevant, because this is their lobby on May 30th, two days before they apparently stop accepting insurance:

Now, I didn’t get a picture– I should, and I will probably swing by tomorrow and take a closer look, because I’m pissed, and I’m pretty sure there are some laws being broken here– of the office/reception space, but it sure as hell looks to me as if everyone’s medical records are still in there. Hundreds if not thousands of patients; as I said, my mom and dad have been seeing this guy for 40+ years.

Dr. Lawrence Curry, D.O., has literally just ghosted all of his patients. Fucking disappeared. Shut down the office without telling anyone– the Shipshewana office mentioned on his website has a disconnected phone number too– and disappeared. Poof. Not an email, not a letter, nothing, and you can tell from looking at recent reviews of his practice on, well, basically any rate your doctor site. There’s one semiliterate screed that suggests that all of his employees quit, which wouldn’t surprise me, because he’s an asshole– but it’s literally so full of typos and crappy grammar that I can’t take it seriously.

Oh, did I mention that his practice shares a building with a physical therapy group? This is on their door:

If it seems like I’m taking this personally, it’s because I am– as I’ve said, I’ve thought the guy was a bastard for decades, and even if he was dead it’s fucking inexcusable that his patients literally have had to do research to find out that their doctor wasn’t their doctor any longer, and now all have to find new doctors– when one of my doctors retired some time ago she passed all of us on to someone else, but that isn’t the case here, because the practice is simply gone. And, again, there look to be several thousand HIPAA violations sitting in cabinets just waiting for some fucker to break a window and go on an identity stealing spree. I want every piece of paper in that office with a member of my family’s name on it, God damn it, and if putting this fucker on blast on the internet helps in any way with making that happen I’m sure as shit gonna do it.

I’ve been reading

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One of my minor goals for this summer is to read more– a lot more– and I finished four or five books in the last week or so. Let’s talk about a few of ’em real quick.

Gender Queer, by Maia Kobabe, was an impulse purchase at Barnes and Noble when I happened to walk past it on display while at the store looking for something else. I grabbed it because I’ve seen it showing up on a lot of banned book lists recently and so I figured that alone was enough of a reason to buy it. I ended up very cautiously recommending it to one of my trans students at school; I hope I don’t actually have to say that I’m against banning books but this one is explicit enough (and the fact that it’s in comic book format doesn’t help) that I can see at least understand why some parents might be uncomfortable with their kids having access to it even if I don’t agree with it.

Honestly, the fact that it’s a memoir called Gender Queer probably tells you everything you need to know about it; Kobabe grows up in a time where ey (eir pronouns are ey/eir/eirs) simply doesn’t have access to the vocabulary to describe how ey feel about eir body. Kobabe is born into a woman’s body, but fantasizes about receiving blowjobs while still not quite feeling like a boy or wanting a new name. Luckily, eir parents are more or less supportive and there is a group for queer students at eir high school, so there’s not the undercurrent of abusive behavior that you might expect from this kind of book. I’ve never read anything substantial written by a genderqueer person, so I’m really glad I picked this one up; you ought to read it.

Rebecca F. Kuang has now written five books that I’m aware of: a military fantasy trilogy, an alternative-history dark magical academia novel, and Yellowface, a modern-day fictional memoir with no fantastic or spec fit elements at all, and I’ve absolutely loved everything she’s read. Kuang’s talent is astounding, frankly; she’s still only fucking 26 years old and no one her age should be able to write this well. I read Yellowface in about a day; it’s written from the perspective of a young struggling white female author, June Rowland, who is friends (exactly how close they really are is never clear, and there are very good reasons to believe we have an unreliable narrator) with Athena Liu, a Chinese-American author and a phenomenal talent whose early works have taken the literary world by storm. The two are at Liu’s apartment after a night of partying and drinking and Liu chokes to death, but not until after showing her friend her latest manuscript, which she’s not told anyone about. And when June leaves her apartment, many hours later, after dealing with the police and the EMTs and the trauma of watching a friend die in front of her, she does it with the only existing copy of the manuscript in her purse. Which she finishes and gets published under her own name. And, well … shenanigans ensue.

Yellowface is one of the most savage works of satire I’ve read in a long time, and it’s definitely among the best books I’ve read this year, if not the best, and I really need someone else I know to read it so I have someone to talk to about it.

I picked up Rebecca Yarros’ Fourth Wing on the strength of a sudden blitz of wildly enthusiastic TikTok praise, which was probably my first mistake. My second mistake was assuming that damn near universal five-star ratings on GoodReads meant anything in particular. That said, I don’t really know how to arrive at a final verdict on this one.

Why? Well, I hated everything about it, for starters. It’s so goddamned tropey that it feels like an AI wrote it. The dialogue is astonishingly bad, with people having lengthy, exposition-filled, complicated conversations in the middle of battle or otherwise stressful solutions all the fucking time. Ever watched an anime where every bit of dialogue is a long speech? Imagine that in written form. The worldbuilding is atrocious; the book is about dragon riders, but it’s really unclear what value the actual riders bring to the battle as the dragons don’t really seem to need them and the humans don’t command them in any meaningful way. (It’s possible that I missed a bit of exposition somewhere on this, as the book overexplains everything else, but it’s absolutely not gone into in any depth.) The dragons are named after their colors and their tails, which, okay, calling a dragon a red daggertail sounds cool, but whoever decided that morningstartail should have been a word? Come the fuck on, especially since fighting with their tails doesn’t much appear to be a thing. The characters are flat, the action is predictable, and the writing is occasionally stunningly terrible– “He was more than four inches over six feet tall” was a sentence that I just stopped and stared at for a few seconds, for example.

Five hundred pages of this. I finished it in less than 24 hours. I gave it three stars on GoodReads because I have no fucking idea even how to think about a book like that. The sequel is coming out in November– ah, another sin; the series is called “The Empyrean Trilogy,” and I’m pretty certain the word Empyrean appears nowhere in the book– and I’m probably going to buy it. You shouldn’t buy or read this, but I did both and for some reason I think I’m going to do so again. I just can’t explain why.

And now one more

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Oh, man, I made so many of them cry today. It was awesome.

I said more or less the same thing to all of my classes today, and I said it today because I expect a fair number of them to be absent tomorrow: that this was the first year that teaching was fun in a very long time, and that the last class of kids that I remember with the level of fondness that I suspect I’ll remember this class with was ten goddamn years ago. This is the end of year 19; seven months ago I wasn’t sure I was going to make it to 20. Now I’m back to thinking I might actually retire from teaching whenever that magical date rolls around, as opposed to quitting in disgust and going to do something else.

Tomorrow afternoon is a field day, and the universe has rewarded me for these heartfelt thoughts by putting me in charge of monitoring the inflatables, which means I am going to spend four hours tomorrow stuck in a gym with several dozen seventh and eighth graders at a time, all of whom will be sweaty and, because I’m working with the inflatables, none of whom will be wearing shoes. I cannot imagine what my world is going to smell like tomorrow. I am not sure that I want to.

A brief, weird little story

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On my way in to work, late last week, I drove by a sign on the side of the road. I didn’t get that long of a look at it, obviously, because I was driving and I wasn’t expecting to suddenly encounter something interesting, but it looked permanent– it wasn’t, like, attached to a light pole or something like that. Somebody had dug holes and poured concrete for this thing.

It was advertising a local business, and had the following instructions on it under the name of the business: STRAIGHT AHEAD, ON THE RIGHT.

And underneath those instructions, an arrow. Pointing to the left.

I very nearly stopped the car and turned around to get a picture of the sign, but again: driving to work, and my margins for “arrive on time” and “perilously late” are, uh, thin, on the best of days. So I resolved to get a picture of it the next day, because obviously I need to put this sign on my blog.

And the next day, the fucker was gone. I have been looking for this sign for a week, assuming that I just didn’t remember where it was or something, and it’s no longer there, and it hasn’t been replaced by anything, either, because surely I would have noticed that. And so I’m left wondering if I just imagined the damn thing, or badly misread it, or what, and I can’t confirm my own memory, and that’s really annoying.

Slightly related, at least according to how my brain works: I live in northern Indiana, maybe a 25-30 minute drive from Michigan. This area is generally known as “Michiana,”(*) and that word is pronounced like you think it is, especially once you realize that the “-ana” part comes from Indiana, a word that is generally pronounced only one way. To be obnoxiously clear about it, that penultimate A is pronounced like the penultimate A in banana or Havana or bat. And I have lived here for more or less my entire life and I have never heard anyone pronounce it incorrectly.

There is a local radio ad that I keep hearing all the Goddamned time for a used car company, and the person reading the ad repeatedly– at least a dozen times in the ad, since the word is part of the car company’s name– mispronounces “Michiana” as “Michi-onna,” like the last o sound in Pokemon. And it drives me into a killing fucking rage every time I hear it, because not only is it wrong and stupid but it offends me on a deep and fundamental level that somebody from the company that paid for this ad listened to it and went yeah, okay, that’s fine, and didn’t immediately demand that the ad be re-recorded because of the constant mispronunciation of the name of their business.

I hate it. I hate it so much.

The end.

(*) I believe I have brought this up in this space before, or at least on Twitter, but Indiana also features Kentuckiana and Illiana, although I do not know if either Indihio or Ohiana, both of which strike me as linguistic abominations, are places. Do other states do this with their border regions? I know there’s a place called Texarkana which, oh, Christ, is in something called the Ark-La-Tex region, but beyond that is it a thing? Is there a Califoregon out there, or a Pennsylvaryland? Michiconsin? Colobraska? Help me out.