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.

Time flies by

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I mentioned to my boss this morning that my back was kinda twingey, and that turns out to have potentially been a mistake, because it got me bundled off to the doctor’s office that the district uses for worker’s comp, which led to a diagnosis of a sprained back and a genuinely shocking pile of medications. They want me back on Monday for a follow-up, too, and they scheduled it (yes, they scheduled it) for 12:15, which might literally be the most inconvenient time imaginable in terms of a two-hour appointment completely borking an eight-hour day. It also meant that I didn’t get home until way later than normal, and then somehow making a couple of baked potatoes for dinner took like a thousand years, and here it is 8:30 and I still have a complicated, annoying job application to fill out before bed, so all my loyal public gets from me tonight is a one-paragraph stream-of-consciousness update.

So, about that …

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Please to be noticing the date on the following Tweet:

Fascinatingly, I am not sick. But my wife is! My wife, who never ever gets sick, who comes from a family where living to 120 is considered underachieving, tested Covid-positive last night. And I, who sleep in the same bed as this woman, remain, as of this morning, almost annoyingly negative. I don’t know how to explain this feeling I have right now. I don’t want to be sick, and I don’t want to have Covid. But my wife has it, and based on all the knowledge I currently have about this disease and its level of transmissibility, spending several days unmasked in the same room with someone who is infectious should practically guarantee that I catch it. And yet I have not caught it, nor has my son, so the possibility of doing so in the near future gets to continue to dangle frustratingly over my head.

I did not go to work today, as I had a slight sore throat (which I have had for several days) and I already had a doctor’s appointment scheduled this morning. I woke up, took a second test– negative again– then went to my doctor’s office, where they redirected me to the back of the building and into a “respiration room,” which was more or less the same as a normal room except with an enormous air filter in it running at high speed. They gave me a third test, which was negative again, then confirmed my plan to stay home as a good one. I went through my checkup, had a blood draw and a pneumonia shot (I replied “I will take all the shots” when asked if I wanted the vaccine) and went home. I spoke with someone from HR who also confirmed that staying home had been the right move because of the sore throat and told me that my Official Instructions from Downtown were to take a fourth test tomorrow morning. If I remain negative, I go to work; if I’m positive, I stay home. Friday is an inservice day, so no kids, and Monday is MLK day, so this would actually be a pretty good weekend to be sick in terms of not missing a lot of school.

Also, if I’m positive, I have to take a selfie of myself with the positive test and send that to the HR lady I talked to, which I find kind of hilarious.

Also possible: that sore throat has been with me for a minute now. It’s not exactly an unexpected thing for a teacher in January to have a sore throat for pretty obvious reasons, but it might be that I actually had covid last week and was so asymptomatic that I didn’t realize it, or at least my symptoms fell so in line with what I was expecting anyway that it never occurred to me to take a test. It’s not entirely unreasonable to theorize that I might have infected her. Another fun possibility that I didn’t think about until after the pneumonia shot was that that could also have side effects, and I do tend to get a day of gross out of vaccines, so it’ll be fun to try and sort those out from potential covid symptoms.

I have been instructed to monitor myself for headaches and diarrhea. Both of those are known symptoms of Omicron and not symptoms of a pneumonia vaccine.

One way or another, it’s gonna be a fun few days around here.

In which I am falling apart

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I had my first dentist appointment since before the pandemic started yesterday morning, and while I don’t have any new cavities or anything worth talking about– it was just a cleaning, after all– it was a cleaning after about a year and a half when normally my hygienist likes to see me every three months so that she can keep an eye on my gums. She did not quite resort to a circular saw to clean my teeth, but it bloody well felt like it, and then I fucked around and had a chicken sandwich for lunch that ripped up the roof of my mouth, so I spent all day yesterday with my teeth and the inside of my mouth aching in a way that wasn’t necessarily bad— like, on that 1-10 scale they like, it’d have been a one or a two– but in terms of sheer persistence was making me absolutely nuts. I had cottage cheese and some loose deli meat last night for dinner last night because the notion of eating anything I’d have to spend much time chewing just seemed entirely unacceptable.

Today I had an eye appointment; those I’ve stayed current on, since they don’t require people to stick their hands in my mouth, which seems safer, but I’m starting to think that I need to go back in time and prevent myself from getting LASIK. The punch line is, at least according to my eye doctor, who was the person who did the LASIK, this was probably coming anyway, and at best might have been faintly aggravated by the LASIK, but I’m having annoying issues with keeping my tear films properly hydrated, despite the fact that I spend half my day every day pouring liquids into my eyes. She flat-out admitted that she doesn’t quite understand what’s going on with me right now, because my vision is varying widely depending on, well, something, but we don’t know what. Like, on one visit I’ll be corrected to 20/10, and then on this one I was at 20/40, and I was at 20/30 on the last one, and the only things that seem to be consistently different are the tear film thicknesses. Today ended with me walking out with two new sets of eyedrops (one medicinal in a fashion that I’m not 100% clear on, another simply an upgrade to the artificial tears I was already using) along with a heat mask that I’m supposed to wear for 15 minutes before bed every night and tiny little plastic plugs inserted into my tear ducts, which were supposed to help me in some way that she explained perfectly clearly at the time and I can no longer repeat. So all day today my eyes have been bugging me.

She was also horrified that my insurance company turned down the sleep study, which … yeah, that’s a whole separate other thing. I feel like I’ve got enough medical issues going on right now without tossing sleep apnea on top. (And suddenly I’m wondering if you can just buy a CPAP, and how expensive such a thing is.)

Anyway, my point is that my everything aches right now and maybe spending all day staring at screens isn’t the smartest move I could be making with my life right now, but, well. We all know how good I am at making decisions.