dr curry – Welcome to infinitefreetime dot com

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.

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.