Grosses Bises/Re-posting as an Object Lesson

Wow.  It's amazing how some things do not change.


I was browsing old entries, looking for something that dated from the summer of 2008.  I have never been a good tagger or key-worder of posts, and many from that time period were left essentially undescribed.  The one that I am republishing now, for instance, bears this label:  "a partridge in a pear tree." Cute, maybe.  Helpful?  Not in the least.


Reading it should have made me laugh, but given how it highlights that inefficiency has been alive and well chez MDVIP Go-To-Guy's office for quite some time, I am not even cracking a small smile.  It's even less amusing since it marks the actual beginning of the Shoulder Infection Saga.  At this point in the ridiculous tale, I had two prosthetic shoulders that had both begun to hurt, accompanied by infamous malaise and fevers.


I may have to give this conspiracy angle more thought, because it looks more and more like things were screwy from the very get-go.


This post is in the form of an email to a then dear friend, who is, remarkably, still a dear friend.  Like everyone at a physical remove, she echos frequent consternation and disbelief at my tales of labs gone missing, labs ruined, doctors out of the country, and health professionals behaving as boors.  I'm sure she thinks this is all an elaborate invention...  Especially after she gets today's email explaining why the wildly anticipated culture results from last week's sampling will not come to anything resembling fruition.


So it is [*poof*] July of 2008 and apparently, I've begun to make serious noise about the state of my shoulders.  After a frustrating few days, I vent to my friend, thusly:








Hullo --

Don't worry, it's not you -- I need some slow-speaking here on my end, too. The quality of the deliberate. Or... I need an analyst's couch.

I can't remember what I wrote to you! The blood work showed an elevated white blood cell count, a very high platelet count, high liver function tests/enzymes -- That's all she told me -- And I didn't want to hear any more. It is, I believe, all very vague. My white counts are usually very stable and hover at the 11,000 mark -- mostly because of my "normal" inflammatory state. (Touche pas à ma phrase...) When I saw him last, I had already started having the fevers and general misery (quelle malaise, cette falaise...) and that white blood cell count was elevated, too, but only to 13,000, I think. It's now 17,000 sumpin' sumpin'.

I need to vent -- which will hardly interfere with the innate logic of my presentation. You know this from innumerable past attempts to plumb the depths of the chaos of my language. My languages.

Where is La Belle Bianca? you ask, voice a-quiver. She is firmly ELSEWHERE today. En vacances, disons. Resting her voice.

So -- Today being Wednesday, we naturally begin from the début of the work week: Monday.(Please recall that Monday marks six days from the blood draw, and six days from the steep clamber up Prednisone Mountain.) I call dear Dr. Go-to-Guy's office and leave a message at about 2 pm. I am feeling like warmed over, tepid crap.

No, of course that is not the essence of my message! What do you take me for, and for whom, too? Also! The message was that I remained febrile, that the stress-dose of steroids had helped with much of the bone and joint pain, but that there was an intensifying, well-localized pain in my right shoulder -- which, by the way, was basically unusable. I did not share la malaise de ma falaise, because who wants to encourage these medical types, these diagnostiqeurs, in their disgust of people with generalized pain and an excess of adjectives? Dear Dr. Go-to-Guy is not your average bear, of course, but I still don't wish to open myself to ridicule, now that the medico blogging world has dared to air its fatigue and discontent. (There has been an adroit movement to shift the blame for the cynicism squarely onto the shoulders of the barrister. Ooooo, smooth-and-wholly-unanticipated!)

There is no call back.

Monday night becomes emotionally bad as well as physically bad because I am just so tired of hanging on. The violins begin to play. Yes, the world's smallest! Bianca warbles in an effort to cheer me up; Dobby plays leapfrog on the very shoulder in question; Marmy offers an exquisite hair ball; Sammy makes goo-goo eyes; and Fred? Well, Fred goes shopping. He is very kind and I try not to overwhelm him with ridiculousness. Good man, that Fred. Well, except for his recent executive decision to use chicken feed as cat litter. Very absorbent, but the house smells like a barn.

Yesterday, Tuesday, I called as soon as they opened, ticked off by then, thinking that my message might have purposely been derailed, thanks to all the bad blood going on between the doctors, nurses, and staff that are leaving to form the new practice, and the ones that are staying behind. Worked myself into a lather, lots of suds! While not normally a conspiracy theorist, I will run with one when tired and dehydrated.

When Darling Nurse does finally call, she does so in order to tell me that she got Monday's message and that she was (profusely) sorry. She lost my chart Monday, and can't do a thing without it and blah blah blah and could she call me back because she needed to consult with dear Dr. Go-to-Guy about a few things? In the inimitable language of Marmy: Ack! Ack! At least, all things are back to normal, and Lee Harvey Oswald did, indeed, act alone.

Darling Nurse's second call: She is kind of scaring me, although I suspect it is more an effort to impress me with references to quick, decisive action -- all brought about by her dedication to my health, and by, of course, the recovery of my chart. Doc is on the phone right now with your orthopedic surgeon (henceforth to be known as ShoulderMan) and he wants an x-ray stat, and probably a bone scan, and so on and so on. Inside, I am a tad bit pissed by all the stat-ness, after having been so desperate for help.

Also, I know that a bone scan would be a massive waste of time, money, and resources.

Third call: We figured out where I could go for the x-ray (to a hospital about 40 minutes from us, but we also would be in bad traffic, very bad traffic) and then she said I needed to call her right before I left the house because she would have "additional instructions" from dear Dr. Go-to-Guy.

Time came for us to leave, at least I think so -- Le Fred is dragging his feet, suddenly has to make a trip to Walmart, suddenly there is an online auction he simply must witness, but overall? He is being a total studmuffin! What no one takes into consideration is that *his* day is being ruined because he has to chauffeur me everywhere. Like I said, a studmuffin.

Anyway, per instructions, I called the office and asked for my good nurse.

-- "Your nurse is on another line, would you like to leave a voice mail?"
-- "No, she told me to speak directly to her."
-- [major put-upon sigh] "Well, i will have to put you on hold."
-- "Okie-dokie!"
-- DISCONNECTED.
-- Repeat performance, the only difference? "Your nurse has taken a patient into a room and won't be available for a while."
-- [major put-upon sigh from MY end!]
-- "Okie-dokie, there, then! We will call her from the hospital's outpatient radiology department. We're leaving. please let her know we are on our way. Thanks!"

I was very proud of my telephone skills, as I am usually nearly phobic. I don't like telephones. Part of the supreme irony of all this? The hospital we were going to is -- literally -- a straight shot across the street from Go-toGuy's office. Why couldn't this all have been: swing by the office on the way to radiology and make sure you have everything you might need?

Shut up, you! Yes, I realize that such a common sensical move was also mine to simply make. One somehow gets caught up in a frenzy of following orders. And yes, of course, if we would just join the rest of the human race and snag some cell phones, some of this ridiculousness might be alleviated.

Anyway, we get there -- We're an hour late but still in the windowof opportunity she outlined for me. I smile a toothy smile at the receptionist because I remember and like her. I give her my full and complete name, get out my picture ID and insurance card, and while she is frowning at her computer monitor and leafing through piles of paper, I make smart chit-chat with The Fredster. (I keep wanting to call him "studmuffin" now, but if he found out, he would be pissed, like he was about the whole "Cabana Boy" snafu! Now *that* was a fine misunderstanding, I must say!)

You're probably ahead of the curve of this story: Right! NO ORDERS. NO PAPERWORK. No outstretched hands to take my proffered proofs of coverage and identity.

Unbelievably, I have a conversation with dear Dr. Go-to-Guy's office staff that is eerily reminiscent of the last one before we left the house, in that 'My nurse isn't available, would I like to... '

"No," I erupted. "I would not like to... What I *need* are some x-ray orders..."

The nice X-ray lady gives me the fax number and I relay it. Then Go-to-Guy's office lady says, "And what is the number if we just want to talk to them some more?"

This is a huge, major hospital that is right across the street from where her little pin head sits. Of course they have the phone numbers.

Still, in the interests of world peace, I ask the nice X-ray lady, who promptly furrows her considerable brow and shakes her head "No. No. No." They just need a number, I beg... and RELUCTANTLY, she gives me a number for their back office. What is the issue about giving out a sacré phone number? Incredible...

In about 10 minutes -- a STAT order is faxed over for a plain x-ray series of the shoulder. Surely this is abuse of the word? All the other stuff, the bone scan and whatever, is not ordered. Fine by me, I have a headache and i think (no, I *know*) we are all bozos on this bus...



So we finish. Hooray! The x-ray tech says, when sufficiently wheedled, that she thinks everything looked fine, but that my doctor will call me at home -- that night, last night, Tuesday night -- as in "shortly."

We crawl home through rush-hour NPR traffic, I feed everyone, am all wound up, very feverish, etcetera, ad museum, et ainsi de suite, and so on and so on, amen. I keep the dread phone at hand.

No phone call. I seem to recollect some involuntary weeping mixed with inchoate laughter.

No sleep -- well, some -- but I don't know how much, because I wake up with the computer on my lap and no memory of what I was doing. I have started a ridiculous little blog and it just gets weirder by the day because of insomnia and pain, plus my undeniable native weirdness -- and I see that I have made an entry into said blog -- again with no memory of it. What the heck, eh? An entry is an entry -- except that I like blogging and want a good calibre of thought and writing -- that is definitely NOT happening now.

We arrive at today, enfin. I get an early morning phone call! Hooray! It is, forgive me, from ShoulderMan's nurse, whom Fred and I call, forgive us, SuperDyke. She is extraordinarily gay, even in this city of the très gay, extremely masculine, and she acts like a drill sergeant. We have been mildly frightened of her in the past, though she is also very, very organized and straightforward, two key characteristics that have been woefully absent this past week.

SuperDyke tells me, first, that they are angry with me because back in 2005, I failed to turn up for my post-op visit with ShoulderMan. I congratulate her on her elephant-like memory and explain that I had multiple problems post-op and that her office told me that none of them were their concern, and that subsequently, I caught pneumonia, was on a ventilator in ICU, and then had to deal with fractures to my sternum from where they did CPR, etc. Screw world peace.

She sniffed.

Then, she shifts into high gear and lays out the arrangements for me to have an aspiration (guided by fluoroscope?) from the shoulder this Friday afternoon -- at yet another hospital, this one totally unaffiliated with my dear Dr. Go-to-Guy. They will culture it and see if it grows any bacteria. That will take time, apparently, and so I won't be scheduled to see ShoulderMan until next Wednesday. Yes, Wednesday, when I am simultaneously scheduled with Magic Eye Doctor to see if my pressures are responding to the glaucoma treatment... Well, cancel that! Magic Eye Doctor already thinks I am avoiding him. (Maybe I will drop off a copy of the Warren Commission Report.)

So now it is "pre-cert" time and la-di-da dealing with BCBS time... and, I figure, dear Dr.
Go-to-Guy will finally call me this afternoon. Yeah! That's the ticket! That's what will happen!

RING RING. It is Go-to-Guy's good nurse, who advises me that she is not normally this bad, it is just that she is kicking her Diet Coke habit. Uh-huh, I say. What happened yesterday with the orders and all, I dare to ask. Oh... I sent them to the wrong hospital...

She is calling to tell me that:

DR. GO-TO-GUY IS OUT OF TOWN UNTIL JULY 24, that I need to "be strong and go on auto-pilot, alternate percocets with ibuprofen around the clock..." oh -- and that SHE JUST GOT IN A TELEPHONE FIGHT WITH DR. SHOULDERMAN, himself.

Well, I know that ShoulderMan and his staff will do the right thing, and shrug it off.

Because I know that they won't take it out on me, the patient!

So that's the whole sad story, in ridiculous detail, my dear Ms. D, and clear as mud, too!

I am munching on sweet, crunchy, bad-for-me cereal, sipping strong cold coffee, burning up with fever and pain, trying to find the high road, so that I can get on it!

Hanging by the proverbial thread,

All my love,
Prof

[it was a tough call, though... which post to repost. "Calling Dr. Hackenbush" was just nosed-out at the finish line...]