All posts for the month July, 2012

7 Ways You Might Get Health Care: a Guide for the Un- and Under-Insured

The other day I wrote a rant about the trials of navigating (and surviving) a health care system that is not friendly to the un- or under-insured. While it was liberating to vent about it, I’m still in the same predicament with a whole lot of other people. So I thought, I am an intelligent, creative person with a world of information at my fingertips via the internet. Surely I can come up with some kind of alternative plan for those of us in this quandary. This is what I came up with:

1- Find a witch doctor– Who says modern medicine is the only way to go? There’something to be said about traditional methods. And there might be a bonfire and some drumming and dancing involved. Sounds like a party to me.

via wikipedia

2- Learn to use chakras and crystal healing – Yes it’s a bunch of hooey, but you get to play with cool rocks and spew mystic nonsense.

3- Consult Dr. Gregory House – So he’s fictional. Just send your problem to the writers of the show and maybe they’ll figure it out for the next episode.

4- See a faith healer – It was good enough for Evander Holyfield (who claims Benny Hinn healed him of a heart problem), right? Oops, almost forgot I’m gay. Kind of rules out the super-powered preacher in the white suit for me. Oh yeah, and he’s a big ole fraud, but I said these were options. I didn’t say they were good options.

5- Find the Holy Grail –Everybody knows about the magic healing powers of the Holy Grail. It worked for Indiana Jones’ father and what’s good enough for Sean Connery is good enough for me. All we have to do is find something that was probably made up by a French poet in the 12th century.

6.Think happy thoughts – Studies show that happy people get sick less and live longer. Maybe you’re sick because you’re sad. Or maybe you’re an asshole. Whatever it is, lighten up! Forget about global warming and famine and world hunger and the sixth extinction. Nothing you can do about it, right? Hate your job, your spouse, your government? Just smile. Think happy thoughts. Remember, the more you complain, the longer God lets you live.

Don’t worry. Be happy.

7- And finally, we always have the Republican health care plan as described succinctly and I think with great insight by Congressman Alan Grayson (D- FL) in 2009: Don’t get sick. If you do get sick, die quickly.

That’s about it, ya’ll. Can you think of anything I left out? I’d love to hear your ideas.

13 Comments

by Fork in My Eye on July 29, 2012 • Permalink

Posted in middle-aging

Tagged Alan Grayson, Benny Hinn, Evander Holyfield, Gregory House, health care, Holy Grail, humor, Indiana Jones, life, medical care, satire, Sean Connery, uninsured

Posted by Fork in My Eye on July 29, 2012

http://forkinmyeye.com/2012/07/29/7-ways-you-might-get-health-care-a-guide-for-the-un-and-under-insured/

An Apple a Day: Why Medical Care in the U.S. Sucks

via zazzle.com

My doctor thinks I’m an idiot. I guess that’s only fair, because I think the same thing about her. I don’t think she’s really stupid as much as she’s arrogant and brusque. And that kind of has the same effect when it comes to doing her job.

So here I am, making my descent into my senior years without a reliable guide – someone who can tell me where not to step, to make it safely down the mountain side. Instead, I’ve got a woman in a lab coat who is so supercilious, she wouldn’t look down if a patient said, “Oh my. We seem to be walking off the edge of a cliff.”

“What source did you get that from?” she might mutter without looking up from her clipboard. The thing is, she really doesn’t have to be that invested because she’s not really not going to fall off that cliff with me. She’s going to stand at the top watching me plummet toward the inevitable and shout, “Just relax and give this treatment a chance. And I’ll see you again in six months!”

Here’s my problem. I am uninsured. I fall through the gaping cracks in the U.S. health care system for several reasons: I am gay, stay-at-home parent to 2 special needs children who need a stay-at-home parent. My partner is the sole breadwinner for our family, and we live month to month.

Because we live in a state that has illegalized gay marriage, my partner is not allowed to insure me on her policy. I cannot work outside the home (at a job that might provide health care) for two reasons: Our children require full-time attention and support for their individual needs. And I have a chronic, debilitating condition which currently makes me unemployable outside the home.

In the last 5 years, I have seen 8 different doctors and specialists for a total of 37 office visits (all without insurance) and still no one has been able to successfully diagnose and treat my problem. For the last 3 years, I have been in a charity care program sponsored by a university in a neighboring town so I am receiving some health care for a greatly discounted cost, but still to no avail. Currently I have 4 different diagnoses from 3 different specialists and the myriad of treatments for each has failed.

I’m not a hypochondriac. I’m not seeking drugs or attention. And I’m not seeking sympathy, just trying to establish my experience with the American health care system so that I can share a few observations I have made in the course of the last 5 years.

Let me say first, that these are generalizations and there are always exceptions. I’ve met a few.Unfortunately, the exceptions are too few and far between to make a much of a difference in the quality of life for me or my family. And here’s why:

1- Doctors are in a hurry. At most practices I have been to (for myself, my partner, and my children),you will rarely get more than 15 minutes. Talk fast.

They can’t all be House, but most of them won’t even try.

2- Doctors don’t listen to the patient. Rarely will a doctor spend time just talking to you in an attempt to gather information about your life that might shed light on your condition. Instead, they will ask you a standard set of questions and stop listening as soon as you try to supply anything more. Then they’ll pick the first explanation of your condition that comes to mind, write a prescription, and tell you to come back in 6 weeks if you don’t get better. When I started complaining of being fatigued and breathless, it took my doctor a year and a half and several visits to figure out I was severely anemic.

3- Doctors are pill-happy, drug dealers. Doctors seem eager to throw some kind of pill at almost every conceivable condition, often without considering its holistic or long-term effects on your life or health. For example, if your doctor has instructed you to take a proton pump inhibitor like Prilosec (for acid reflux) for long periods of time (over 2 weeks), chances are he did not tell you how sick it will make you when you try to stop taking the medication or that it may interfere with your body’s ability to absorb certain nutrients. And chances are, unless you have very good insurance and or a lot of money (or both), he will not even run the tests that will tell him whether or not you really needed it in the first place. It’s easier just to give you the drug and see what happens. This trend seems more than coincidental to me considering the huge amount of time, money, and effort that drug companies put into convincing doctors to push their products.

4- Too many cooks. Doctors don’t coordinate with each other.God forbid you have to go to more than one specialist for the same problem. I’ve been to five. And they’ve all given me different and sometimes contradictory diagnoses for the same problem.They don’t talk to each other and my GP doesn’t talk to any of them or try to make sense of the conflicting diagnoses.

5- Doctors are not available at night or on weekends. There are roughly 40 hours a week that the sick or injured may expect to see their own doctor (or another doctor at the same practice) because most medical practices are only open during “working hours.” The other 128 hours of the week are considered “emergency” care times and you will be expected to go to an urgent care clinic to see a “doc in a box,” often just a pimple-faced nurse-practitioner with a prescription pad.

Or you must go to a hospital emergency room where it’s entirely possible that the harried, inexperienced nurse doing triage will miss the potentially life-threatening nature of your condition and leave you to wait 6 to 8 hours in excruciating pain before you get to see a doctor who then gets called away to work on an accident victim while you get handed over to a nervous resident with shaking hands who has never before performed the painful, potentially dangerous procedure the doctor ordered. (Yes, that last part actually happened – to my partner and I still want to make someone pay.)

: Typical American den of pain and misery.

6- Emergency care sucks – Most emergency rooms I have seen are underfunded, understaffed, and overcrowded dens of misery, blood and bacteria. And triage is about keeping people from dying right away when there’s not enough staff to take care of them all. It’s certainly not about relieving pain and suffering or providing quality health care. Your regular doctor and his/her practice is supposed to do that. But only 40 hours a week. You see the problem here?

I have no real advice here except to choose your doctor carefully (if you have a choice which many of you don’t) and read up on everything. Exercise, watch your diet, maybe take up take up Yoga. As for me, I think I’ll buy a bag of Granny Smith apples. And next time I think about going to the doctor, I’ll just take one out, draw a little face on it, and stick a fork in it instead.

Be sure to come back and check out my next post where I will explore fun, creative ways to avoid seeing an MD altogether!

17 Comments

by Fork in My Eye on July 25, 2012 • Permalink

Posted in middle-aging

Tagged American heath care, apple, diagnosis, doctors, emergency rooms, health care, humor, life, medical care, medicine, satire

Posted by Fork in My Eye on July 25, 2012

http://forkinmyeye.com/2012/07/25/an-apple-a-day-why-medical-care-in-the-u-s-sucks/

Aging Still Sucks

Disclaimer: Reading this essay may cause mild to severe panic in individuals approaching middle age.

Maybe it started when your arms got shorter. Suddenly they weren’t long enough to read the small print on your pill bottles. So you bought your first pair of reading glasses. Or maybe it was that first pill case you bought with compartments for each day of the week to remind you to take your “meds.” These are all signs that you have reached your biologically-predetermined peak in life and are now making your descent toward your “silver years.” It really is all downhill from here. The only question now is, will you remain intact enough to enjoy the trip, or will you get caught up in an avalanche and be swept away in a crushing tumbler of metaphorical ice, snow and stone?

The first signs of impending catastrophic aging are gradual and sneaky. You can get used to anything – even the ground shivering occasionally beneath your feet. If it doesn’t go away, it becomes your new normal. For instance, I’ve recently invested in stronger reading glasses, and if I get caught without them, I have to have one of the children read labels for me. I’ve also graduated from a simple 7-cell pill case to a pill condo with 28 individual compartments, four for each day – a reward for scoring badly on my last blood test.

I’ve noticed many other signs of aging escalation that I’m sure many of you share. If you’re over 40, chances are you grunt or groan when you sit down or stand up. It may be subtle. You may not even notice you’re doing it. Ask your husband/wife/partner. They’ll tell you. He or she will also probably tell you that you snore. It’s also likely that you have trouble sleeping, that you feel like absolute crap first thing in the morning, that you suffer from some kind of chronic anxiety or depression, that you have frequent headaches or acid reflux or both, that various joints are showing signs of irreparable damage, that you are overweight, that you have to exercise twice as hard or long as you did 10 years ago to achieve the same effect, and that there are foods you can no longer eat without extreme discomfort (or without clearing a room). And if you’re a woman, your reproductive system is preparing to shut down spurring a whole host of fun symptoms (which deserves a whole essay of its own, so I won’t elaborate here).

Don’t despair. There’s a bright side to aging. Or so I’m told. You get to develop character. “That which does not kill us…” and all that, right? Yes, I know. What a crock of shit. See, now we’re finally old enough to really understand what a nutcase Nietzsche was. Pain is just pain and it sucks. It doesn’t make you stronger. It just is and most of the time, we endure it because we have no choice. So no, aging isn’t for wimps but even the wimps will do it. They’ll just whine more.

But the good part is, if you can learn to live with the change without whining, you start noticing things. Maybe you stop taking so much for granted. You appreciate little things like you never have before – a good night’s sleep, not passing gas during a meal in public, or just the time you get to read a book while you’re in the waiting room at your doctor’s office.

Or maybe you notice just how amazing being alive really is, breathing out and breathing in, and thinking about every living thing that ever breathed that same air, or where the water in your glass was a million years ago or the exploded star your molecules came from. Just being able to think about all that while feeling the sun on your face, well, that’s a lot.

But it’s not everything. C’mon. There are going to be times when you can’t manage that isn’t-life-amazing-I’m just-happy-to-be-here mojo. So here’s my advice, just a few things I do when I’ve had a rough day of living:

1- Watch a monster movie.Nothing will make you appreciate being alive more than watching other people being eaten alive by a giant, angry shark. Or an alien with acid for blood. Or a pack of zombies, pirate ghosts, guild-ridden werewolves, pissed-off angels, vampires with a conscience, wise-cracking demons who want to be human, giant desert worms, or 3,000-year-old reanimated mummies of ancient aliens. Fill in your monster(s) here.

: Funny monster movies are even better.

2- Read a funny book. It’s hard to complain while you’re laughing. I can personally attest that any of the following authors will make you snort your coffee: Terry Pratchett, Christopher Moore, Tom Holt, Bill Bryson, David Sedaris, and Janet Evanovich. And special kudos to Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett for Good Omens.

3- Spend time with your kids. If yours are teenagers, this might be a little more difficult than it was when they were little. But even mine are willing to patronize the parents once in a while and have a family movie night or go out for snow cones. Even if you just get them talking while you drive the carpool to school, they can be quite entertaining and something about their enthusiasm is infectious.

That’s about all I have in my arsenal except for going hiking with my camera which you already know about if you’re a regular follower of this blog. So what do you do to combat the rigors of aging? I’d love to hear some suggestions.

For those of you who are interested, see my first post on this subject: Aging Sucks.

34 Comments

by Fork in My Eye on July 23, 2012 • Permalink

Posted in middle-aging

Tagged aging, funny books, health, humor, life, monster movies, pill case, reading glasses, signs of aging

Posted by Fork in My Eye on July 23, 2012

http://forkinmyeye.com/2012/07/23/aging-still-sucks/

All the Days of Summer

“Hold summer in your hand, pour summer in a glass, a tiny glass of course, the smallest tingling sip for children; change the season in your veins by raising glass to lip and tilting summer in.”

- Ray Bradbury, Dandelion Wine

When I was a kid, summer was all about freedom – from school, from homework, from having to close the book and turn out the light too early every night, from bells ringing and chalk squeaking on a black board and being expected to sit for most of the day. And from staring out the window daydreaming about being out there, outside under the fierce sun and fathomless sky watching clouds scud across the blue like clipper ships with full sails.

Sometimes, I think I remember my childhood summers like stories Ray Bradbury wrote just for me. If you picked up my copy of I Sing the Body Electric or Golden Apples of the Sun, you’d find them there, my stories, like the thirteenth floor in tall buildings, invisible until you looked for them. And when you did, there I’d be in print – running with the neighborhood kid pack, riding my bike and going barefoot and wading in ditches and scooping polliwogs into pickle jars.

The summers I remember smelled of pine sap and honeysuckle and sounded like cicadas. There were water moccasins in the garden, gators in the bayou, and graveyards in the woods. All old homes were haunted, especially if they were built before the Civil War, and people said the river sang with the voices of a vanished Indian tribe. I wore cut-offs and drank water from the hose, got bitten by mosquitoes and deer flies and horse flies and ants, climbed trees and neighbors’ fences, and rode my bike around deserted schools and vacant ballparks. Sometimes I’d stay out until the bats swooped in the evening sky and the streetlights flickered on and my mother’s voice began calling me home.

If I was inside on a summer day, I was reading a book – Bradbury or Heinlein or Asimov or Clarke, stories where anything could happen and usually did. A trip to the Pascagoula Public Library to stock up on new stories was even better than a visit to the Pixie Pet Shop where we got our dog (a 12-pound miniature dachshund named Caesar) and where they kept a real piranha in a huge murky tank. The library was seemed dark when you first stepped in from the afternoon sun until your eyes adjusted and you could see all the daylight the old building let in, dust motes drifting in rays of light from walls of paned windows. The air inside was cool and smelled of aging paper and ink and glue. Its stacks were labyrinthine and had creaky wooden floors, high shelves, and secret corners perfect for reading. The librarians were traditional and enforced the quiet so it was easier to dive out of the world and surface in another where dinosaurs still lived or spaceships were real.

“He brought out a yellow nickel tablet. He brought out a Ticonderoga pencil. He opened the tablet. He licked the pencil…”

When Ray Bradbury passed away a few weeks ago, just before what would have been his 92^nd summer on the planet, all I could think was – the world will be poorer without him but thank goodness for all the stories he left us – The Martian Chronicles, Fahrenheit 451, Something Wicked This Way Comes. And especially for my favorite, Dandelion Wine. In that novel, he created the most magical summer I’ve read (or experienced) making me feel nostalgic about growing up in the Midwest in the 1930s though I was raised a thousand miles away and 40 years later.

So I might have semi-mythologized the summers of my own childhood and it might have been at least partly Ray Bradbury’s fault. I might have glossed over all the mundane details, and I’ve realized lately – I really owe him for that. Because what else are we but a set of selective memories we take out to re-live, tell it like a story, polish it like a stone, and then put it away again? I’ve got some good stories now, and like dandelion wine, they get better with age. Thank you, Ray. RIP.

16 Comments

by Fork in My Eye on July 16, 2012 • Permalink

Posted in coolest beans, lost world

Posted by Fork in My Eye on July 16, 2012

http://forkinmyeye.com/2012/07/16/all-the-days-of-summer/

Roadside Relics: Old American Motels

I love old motels. We used to live in a mountain tourist town that had a leftover population of the old lodgings in various stages of decay. So for a time, I collected them – with my camera.

The cool thing about digital collections, besides the fact that they occupy very little space outside the virtual world (a handy fact that helps to keep me firmly on this side of the line that separates “collector” from “hoarder”), is that I can play with photos later. Lately, I’ve been trying to learn a little more about how to use Photoshop Elements, so I experimented on some old motel photos.

I thought I would provide a little history to go along with this bit of Americana: Motels evolved along with American car culture.

My car in another life.

As the US highways sprouted in the 1920s, auto travelers needed handy places to stop for the night that were affordable and easily accessible. So the motor inn in all of its various incarnations (motor court, motor lodge, tourist lodge, cottage court, tourist cabins, auto cabins, cabin court, or auto court) was born.

Sadly, the Rockola was torn down not long after this was taken.

It might have been 1960 if it weren’t for the Coke machine.

The word motel was coined in the mid-1920s as a combination of the words motor and hotel. Motels were often a cluster of cottages or cabins with common parking area or a single building of connected rooms that opened on the parking lot which allowed rumpled, road-weary travelers to get to their rooms without trudging through stuffy lobbies.

One of my favorite motel signs ever.

Tropical bungalow style motel in the mountains 800 miles from Miami.

In the fifties and sixties, to get motorists’ attention, motels often featured colorful neon signs and themes from pop culture. Sadly, after the sixties, chains like Holiday Inn began to run unique, privately-owned motels out of business.

There’s still a few around, though, if you’re lucky enough to stumble across them.

24 Comments

by Fork in My Eye on July 13, 2012 • Permalink

Posted in lost world, shutter-bugged

Tagged Americana, car culture, cars, highways, inn, life, lodging, Motel, motor court, Neon sign, nostalgia, old motels, parking lot, Photoshop Elements, travel

Posted by Fork in My Eye on July 13, 2012

http://forkinmyeye.com/2012/07/13/roadside-relics/

Because Life is Sticky: A Countdown of My Top Five Favorite Onerous Household Chores

via bonanza.com and Erma Bombeck

Disclaimer: If you’re not a stay-at-home mom, house dad, homemaker, or someone else who spends a substantial amount of time cleaning up after your family, you may want to skip this fun little list as its grossness factor is high and its only real entertainment value is in commiseration.

Note: I have omitted anything involving blood, pee, poo or vomit for being too evident. Everybody knows that no parent likes changing diapers or cleaning up after sick or injured children or pets. This list concerns a few of the disgusting chores that get less attention but may be even more onerous by virtue of their long-term (i.e. well past potty-training) and frequent occurrence.

5 – Scraping fruit stickers off the sink, counter, or furniture. Do your kids do this? Take the sticker off the apple or banana and carefully press it onto the edge of the kitchen sink or other handy surface? This is one of the many things that sometimes makes me wonder what my kids really think of me. Do they really believe I have nothing better to do than to scrape away the sticky left by a Granny Smith apple label? Look kids! Here I am, putting my college degree to use with the dull edge of a butter knife. Thank goodness for Goo Gone, the wonder product that removes all residual stickiness! (And the fact that I just wrote that sentence with genuine gratitude makes me want to stick a fork in my eye right now.)

4 – Cleaning in and around trash cans. Nothing more fun to me than picking up used Kleenex or dental floss off the bathroom floor because our sons just missed the trash can. (Not the only thing they miss, but I promised not to mention that.) The kitchen trash can is even worse. Ours has a lid because otherwise our dogs would help themselves. How does a kid manage to lift the lid, deposit the item, close the lid, and then manage to spill food on top of the lid (and wall and floor)?

3 - Cleaning out the bottom of the refrigerator after discovering that somebody has spilled something liquid and sugary in the not-so-recent past (giving plenty of time for maximal microbial and fungal growth before I discover the bulk of the spill hidden by the bottom drawer). Last time I think it was a mixture the juice from a can of black olives and some kind of red soda.

2 – Reaching into the spaghetti pot soaking in the sink to remove whatever my family has thrown into the water. Do your loved ones do this? Why do they do this? I need to know. I fill the pot with hot soapy water to soak so I can scrub it clean in the near future. But if I leave it in the sink and do not get back to it quickly enough, my family, rather than rinsing their post-dinner dishes and putting them in the dishwasher or other side of the sink, will simply dump every utensil or plate or glass they use into the pot. So now I have to reach into cold, greasy, rehydrated tomato-sauce-water (which now contains a rich, varied mixture of other organic debris) to retrieve a glass that originally just held someone’s after-dinner iced tea but is now coated in a viscous residue from the dirty orange dishwater soup. Ugh.

1 – Reaching into the garbage disposal to retrieve whatever is making the horrible noise. So far I have found spoons, forks, broken glass, bottle caps, lemon or lime rinds, a marble, a handful of pennies, a Lego Guy, and just today, a white jelly-like sack of something that looked like a breast implant with a tough pulpy core that I can’t identify and sincerely wish I had never handled.

Some days, I love my job less than others.

So your turn. What’s your favorite housework to hate? What chores make you feel like an underappreciated, domestic grunt with dishpan hands?

27 Comments

by Fork in My Eye on July 9, 2012 • Permalink

Posted in house or home

Tagged cleaning, domestic, Erma Bombeck, family, home, homemaker, household chores, Housekeeping, Housewife, housework, kids, Kleenex, life, list, Parenting, sticky

Posted by Fork in My Eye on July 9, 2012

http://forkinmyeye.com/2012/07/09/because-life-is-sticky-a-countdown-of-my-top-five-favorite-onerous-household-chores/

Who Needs a Darkroom?

I think that to me probably the coolest thing about the 21st century besides digital cameras is photo editing software. I have Photoshop Elements and sitting on my couch tinkering with it sure beats investing in a bunch of expensive equipment and spending an afternoon in a dark closet with open trays of smelly chemicals. Even for a complete novice like me, adjusting the basics is pretty simple. Then I just have to pick what I like best.

But I can be seriously indecisive, so I thought I’d get your help. Here are three different treatments of the same image of a leafless tree towering over an abandoned school. What do you like best?