Tag: doctors

In which my day is expensive and needley

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy1 Comment

I managed to hit a parked car in my own fucking driveway this morning.

We have, for lack of a better word and in the interest of not telling a long story, a Tenant in our house. She’s been here for several months. She parks her car in the driveway every single morning. Because our garage is currently packed full with bullshit, my wife has also been parking in the driveway. I am on Fall Break, as all of you know, and for some reason when I left my house for a doctor’s appointment at 7:50 this morning, the fact that my wife’s car was not in the driveway made my fucking brain short-circuit and I assumed that that meant the other car was not in the driveway either. I realized my terrible mistake about half a second too late, and I don’t know yet how much my fucking idiocy is going to cost me.

To the doctor’s! Where I received a hepatitis B shot (needle #1) and had blood drawn (needle #2) so that my A1C could be tested. It’s 5.7! The diabeetus is officially Controlled! I can go off one of my many medications now!

Seriously, one of these days I’m going to take a picture of the pile of fucking pills I ingest every night. It’s ludicrous.

I also had to fill out the questionnaire about my mental health that I have to fill out every time I go to the doctor since I’m on brain meds. I was honest on the depression scale, but I handed the anxiety scale over to the doctor and told her flat-out that I was lying on it. Why? There’s a fucking election in two weeks, and my anxiety is off the scale but not in a way that adjusting my meds is going to help. We’re gonna leave those alone, and in about two weeks I’m either gonna be fine or I’m gonna need a prescription for fucking strychnine.

I mailed the postcards.

And then I went and got my second tattoo (Needles #3- God, who knows) in two months. My appointment started at 11:00 in the morning and I wasn’t finished until 4:15. My arm fucking hurts— this was easily the most painful tattoo (and the biggest, and the most colorful) I’ve ever had, and you can see from all the open pores at the bottom of the image that my arm isn’t terribly happy with me. Hummingbirds were my mom’s favorites, though, and I absolutely love the design. Griffin Freehling at Enamored Arts, LLC does great work. But holy shit, I need to not spend any more money at all for the rest of my break.

Yay, nuts!

On By Luther M. SilerIn ParentingLeave a comment

It’s official: as of today, my son is no longer allergic to tree nuts or coconuts. Peanuts, unfortunately, are still on the no-go list, and are likely to remain there for the rest of his life, but he’s gone from a kid with a laundry list of allergies as a baby to just peanuts as a nearly-teenager and, even better, he’s managed to do it without ever having any reactions to anything stronger than a mild rash. Every other person I know with a peanut allergy has had to reach for an epipen at least once.

I probably have a similar post back in the archives from the Egg Challenge and the Strawberry Challenge, but the way this works is that they do a skin test first. He passed the skin test for everything but peanuts. So they pick one tree nut– apparently the allergen is common to all of them so it doesn’t really matter what kind you get– and they bring you into the doctor’s office, and they feed you a tiny sliver of the thing, then wait half an hour, then a little more, then half an hour, then a little more, then half an hour, and then a nice mouthful and this time they wait an hour. It takes forever and most of it is spent sitting around hoping to continue to be bored, because if something interesting happens it will be something terrible.

I forgot to bring a book, so I spent the whole morning holding forth on BlueSky. You should join me over there!

Also, speaking of joining me, I’m two minutes away from the White Dudes for Harris kickoff. Are you a white dude? Come on over. I don’t really plan on being there for much more than half an hour or so– from the list of Names they’re expecting, this is going to go on for hours, and I don’t have the stamina– but I’ll show up at the start and donate money again to pump up the numbers.

Tomorrow, Deadpool & Wolverine. For reals this time.

In which I’m not dying

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy2 Comments

Another “not much going on” day, and if I wasn’t sure it was summertime before, the way I can’t find anything interesting to say about anything very well might be the clearest evidence I’ve seen yet.

Oh, wait, I do have something.

So, yeah, I don’t have liver cancer.

Not that I really thought I had liver cancer, but it’s been a possible-but-not-especially-likely future that’s kind of been floating over my head for the last few weeks. I had a liver ultrasound in May to confirm that some bloodwork abnormalities were because of fatty liver syndrome(*), and the ultrasound found a lesion on my liver. This is one of those “this is common, and not a big deal, but we’re going to check it out in case it’s a big deal, because if it’s a big deal, and it’s not a big deal, but if it’s a big deal it’s a big deal” type of things, where it’s almost definitely not liver cancer but hey dude, uh, go schedule a CT scan just to be sure?

I don’t know if you’ve ever had a CT scan before. I hadn’t, so I went in kind of not knowing what to expect other than that I was going to be fed into a large doughnut-shaped machine. They’d told me not to eat for four hours before the procedure, but as it was at 8:25 in the morning, that wasn’t a challenge. What they didn’t tell me, and I’m not sure if this is the case for every CT scan or not, was that I’d be on an IV briefly during the procedure, so I probably should have had a gallon of water or so before going in. My veins are utter bastards under the best of circumstances– I have grown used to telling people trying to draw blood to go directly to the back of my hand and not even to try the crook of my arm– and “slightly dehydrated” is not the best of circumstances. Two people, four sticks, and the bruises on my arm right now are impressive.

At any rate, the IV was to feed something into my veins that would dilate them to make them show up more easily on the scan. NBD, right? I was impressed at the length and detail involved in their explanation of what I was going to experience during the “minute to a minute and a half” that the chemical was going to be active in my veins. Namely, everything heated up, starting with my ears, which were abruptly twenty degrees warmer than the rest of my body, followed by my face, and then everything else.

I was warned that I might think I was wetting myself, and guaranteed that I was not. I was also warned that I might feel like I had an erection and that that also would not be happening, and my immediate and complete crackdown on the urge to make some sort of terrible joke made me kind of proud of myself. At any rate, I didn’t really experience either, although I can kind of see how people might feel like a spreading pool of warmth in their lap might be alarming. The sensation in general came right up to the edge of unpleasant and then receded as quickly as it came, and then I was done. I had the results this afternoon; I have a “tiny,” their words, cyst on my liver, perfectly normal and either highly unlikely or actually unable to turn into anything alarming.

(I am unsure, and I’ll talk to my doctor about this, if this is something I should keep an eye on in the future, or if I have, as my wife put it, “a new liver friend,” but they’re definitely not worrying about it now, and I can stop mentally appending “… so long as I don’t have liver cancer” to every discussion of anything happening in the future.)

Oh, and then once I was done the nurse went to take the blanket off of me, and abruptly stopped and said “Wait, do you still have your pants down?”, which, yes, I do, because lady you can see my hands, and I did not use the muscles in my ass to pull my pants back up, so … gimme a second, here. I also refrained from wisecracking at that, so I genuinely deserve some sort of prize here for my restraint and class.

(*) They were. This is also not especially alarming, although I need to do some reading on exactly what it means other than that my liver is as fat as the rest of me.

Today was a day

On By Luther M. SilerIn lifeLeave a comment

Kinda rough day at work, got some annoying medical news, got some more shitty news on the way home, and spent an hour and a half working on a study guide for tomorrow that the kids won’t bother to read. I’d go to bed, but my wife and son aren’t even home yet. One way or another, I think I’m taking the night off from blogging.

Nope

On By Luther M. SilerIn ParentingLeave a comment

I was gonna blog tonight but instead I took my kid to get a weirdly-scheduled evening MRI (he’s fine, don’t worry) and now that I’m back home all I want to do is sleep.

So. Yeah.

In which I broke my promise

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, lifeLeave a comment

My big plan from yesterday to post something longer than a paragraph for the first time in several days ended up flopping, falling victim to the worst anxiety attack I’ve had in quite some time. Anxiety attacks are not normally known for carefully justifying themselves, but this one made even less sense than usual, given that I could not and can not come up with anything in particular that I need to be anxious about. But that’s not how mental illness works, of course; the shit fucks you up whenever it feels like it, and for whatever reason mine felt like fucking with me last night, and it was all I could do to sit at my desk and idly web surf last night. Putting any sort of coherent thoughts together was just not happening. I took a brain pill at like 8:00 and went to bed early, and today I’ve been more or less back to normal, whatever that is.

I’m done with my Christmas shopping– have been for a week or so now, so long as we don’t really consider find a Christmas gift to give my wife and tell her it’s from the boy to be a real responsibility. He told me again today that he didn’t have any ideas for her, and while in principle I agree with my son that my wife is one of the more difficult people to buy for that I have known in my life, I asked him if he’d asked her what she wanted, and he looked at me like that was a rare and challenging idea that no reasonable person would have ever come up with on their own. 

Sigh.

There’s an update on the Dr. Curry situation, too; after several months of calling everyone I could think of short of the actual police (multiple lawyers, the state medical board, the newspaper, the Better Business Bureau, any number of online doctor things) and getting no help from anyone, I’d decided that I was at the very least going to spend several hours Friday morning camped out in his parking lot. I brought a couple of drinks, some snacks, and a book, fully prepared to be there all morning at least. I was genuinely considering just breaking into his office if nothing appeared to be different, although it had occurred to me that one final (legal) remedy might be to see if I could find the owner of the building and see f they would let me in. The last resort would be to contact the police, and if the police didn’t or couldn’t do anything about the situation (and, let’s be real, the police were not going to be useful in this case,) well, I’d been in the building enough times to know that all I’d need to get into his office proper would be a crowbar and five minutes. The place is not exactly Fort Knox, and that’s taking the harder route of going through the doors rather than trying to haul my fat ass through a window.

Anyway, I won’t post pictures this time, but there were two new signs on the door– one from the landlord (!) advertising that the building was for rent and that loitering and trespassing was discouraged, and that the building was under “video severance,” which is about the level of competence I’ve come to expect from everyone involved in this damn ordeal. The second was more interesting, advising anyone looking for their medical records to contact the Indiana Deputy Attorney General through the Department of “Complex Litigation” at the AG’s office in Indianapolis. They provided a phone number; I called it and left a message when I got home, but as it was the Friday before Christmas I’m not holding my breath about a swift return call. I’ll try again on Wednesday and if no one answers that time I’ll try again after New Year’s. One way or another I hope they don’t make me jump through too many hoops to get Dad’s medical records back. ”Complex Litigation” makes me hope that someone has had more luck finding an interested attorney than I did and is suing the ever-loving shit out of this son of a bitch. 

So, yeah. I didn’t get arrested, which makes the story less funny than it ought to be, but at least I’m a step or two closer to getting this out of the way. 

What a weird day

On By Luther M. SilerIn life, TeachingLeave a comment

My day started with a visit to my dermatologist, who is a lovely person. I only have a dermatologist because I asked my doctor once to check out a mole that is located on my back and squarely in the middle of a tattoo; she made me a referral out of an excess of caution and since then once a year in June or July I get way closer to naked than I’m comfortable with in a room sometimes containing as many as three other people (only two, this time) and they pore over damn near every inch of me– way too much, one way or another– with those little flashlights dermatologists use. As of yet there have been no issues, and as I don’t encounter the sun unless absolutely necessary, skin cancer really isn’t very high on my list of health concerns. My dad has had a few suspect moles removed, I think, but I have considerably fewer moles than he does.

When she came in today, I referred to my visits with her as the most awkward fifteen minutes of my year, which is a virtual guarantee that my regular doctor will insist on a prostate exam when I see her in July. Stand by for that one; it’ll be fun for everybody.

The rest of my day was taken up with interviews for the open assistant principal position at my school. I haven’t fully written out all of the rules for the Assistant Principal Interview Drinking Game, but if you sip every time you hear the word relationships and finish your drink whenever you hear servant leader, you will be fucking dead by the end of the game. This is the second round of first round interviews, since the first time around we went to two different people and offered them the job and they both went elsewhere, so we had to start the search over. I think we had two really solid candidates out of the batch, so hopefully one of them ends up still being available at the end of the week when we make an offer.

Also, if you get asked “What would you do if you witnessed one student bullying another student,” and your reaction is to freeze for ten seconds while you consider your answer to this utter fucking softball of a question, you may consider yourself instantly eliminated from the competition. You had to know there were questions about bullying coming. Had to.

Anyway, now I’m exhausted. I conked out on the couch for about half an hour after I got home, then got up and had dinner, and now that my Computer Tasks are done for the night. Tomorrow morning is another four hours of meetings with the honors teachers and then I think I’ve got the rest of the week to myself.

Dr. Lawrence Curry, DO update

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocyLeave a comment

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.