29 Comments

  1. I’m locked in a battle of wits with one of of my doctor’s offices to the point where I want to pull out of the system altogether, find a “real” primary care provider in one of the tonier parts of town, and get into a different hospital system. I’m told they’re all equally good/bad, but a friend of mine works at a competing one (in a non-health-care-giving way) so if I could get into her network and see the specialists there maybe we could go to lunch in the cafeteria together, pre- or post-visit. Plus her place is in the hospital district in Lenox Hill/The Upper East Side, not this godforsaken “Escape From New York” landscape. I will miss seeing elderly versions of Better Half in the waiting rooms and hearing the Caribbean Spanish being spoken by the desk staff and the idiots on their phones in the waiting rooms, but that is a sacrifice I will have to bear. I will have to “refresh” my wardrobe, though, so as not to experience crippling social or class anxiety.

    • Keep living that fantasy. Doctors don’t take casual lunches in the cafeteria. They’re constantly grabbing this or that snack laying around and shoving it down their gullet before moving on. If you got 15 minutes in the exam room that would be as good as it gets.

      • No, she’s not a doctor, or a nurse, or any kind of health-care provider. It was in my comment:

        (in a non-health-care-giving way)

        She’s a…I won’t say what she is, it’s a very specific role, and its not like that for her. She doesn’t deal with the patients, she deals with the doctors. So her days are far more predictable.

        • But that said, and I’m not going to edit this comment again, she knows tons of the specialists and actually does run into them in the cafeteria, according to her, maybe briefly. That’s what I’m thinking. Suppose I make an appointment like the botched one that I’m still trying to resolve with my own idiotic and Kafka-esque health “care” system. She could DM the specialist, bypassing the two robots at the front desk who never answer the phone and never pass along messages to the doctors, and things would go more smoothly.

          The thing is, I love that system. I love all the doctors and nurse practitioners and anesthesiologists and the phlebotomists and the techs, everyone. I just can’t stand the front desk people, who no doubt are understaffed and overworked, but have the work ethic of a 20-year lifer sitting behind the desk at the local DMV. And with the health care crisis in New York, and the shortage of people who have any training in the mind-numbing billing procedures that this country’s “not for profit” health care system has to submit to the insurance companies (Thanks, Gore VP pick Joe Liebermann! Joementum!) they’re not going anywhere, and they know it.

          • No, I know what you meant. I had one procedure where things were pretty quiet in this other ancillary hospital and I was “in recovery” so I almost had a private nurse (who, it turns out, went to high school with a younger friend of mine.) BH was supposed to retrieve me, and my new best friend, the nurse, put me in a wheelchair because the complex is huge, and then at the exit I got out of it with her and my cane and looked across Fifth Avenue at Central Park.

            “Oh look! Those kids playing soccer. Do you go into the Park at lunchtime? I used to. I worked near Columbus Circle.”

            “I grab a sandwich and lie down in the [I forget what she called it. It wasn’t restroom or break room. It was a room with actual barracks-style beds.]”

            She stayed with me, enjoying the fine weather, and then BH showed up in the Uber and I bid her adieu. Tough life, nursing. Even in the quietest wards.

    • Our family doctors in our little town are terrific.  Their offices run great, everybody looks out for us, and I haven’t had a single problem with them in 5 years.

      It might be geographical.  We had great doctors in California and Houston, but shitty doctors in Connecticut.  Or maybe it has something to do with the group practices they belong to or the insurance.

      This shit should not be hit-or-miss.  Matty I’m sorry you’re having issues over there.

      • The doctors are perfectly fine, you just gave to get to them. And all these “not-for-profit” hospital systems have turned into this weird two-tiered very-much-for-profit system. So if you want to go see someone the gatekeepers and the weeks-long waits for appointments, because they’re not staffed nearly adequately enough.

        But then, as I detailed when Giggles ultimately, with a lot of supervision, gave me the blood transfusion, they’re more than willing to keep you for a week or two under false pretenses, “observation” and random testing, because you’re the only one on the entire floor (once they eventually find you a bed, and they’re very bad about “load management”) with private health insurance, so you’re going to pay the tab for half your temporary neighbors.

        But maybe that’s what I should do. Call an ambulance, I think my insurance covers that, direct them to my friend’s hospital, can’t be any worse than the snake pit Giggles works at, describe my lengthy three-and-a-half-year decline which has been diagnosed at length, but not really ameliorated, let alone cured, and let them take a crack at me.

        • I don’t think your care is really going to be any better uptown. Although seeing your friend would be nice.

          Money/celebrity status of some kind (for example baseball player, etc) seems to be what gets better care more than the actual location a person is at.

          • No, I am uptown, that’s my problem. I need to go over to where the (not to put too fine a point on it) rich Jewish people go. They don’t put up with this. We should have accepted a smaller apartment and a slightly less desirable UES address and the dreaded co-op review, but we both needed to be on the west side and someone clued us into the very large apartments at The Casa Encantada. It’s been fine, really, but I sometimes feel like one of those Colonial Office or foreign correspondent characters in an Evelyn Waugh novel. I want to yell at people: “Have you never taken the subway out of this neighborhood?”

  2. I got my teeth cleaned, which is never any fun, but to treat myself I stopped by my favorite Italian grocery and picked up pickled artichoke hearts, prosciutto, olives and a bottle of arancello.

  3. I’m back home, yay!

    On my flight home, I was seated next to a Tibetan guy. He grew up partially in the mountains of northern India and partially in Seattle and travels the world teaching meditation. We really hit it off like old friends. Not bonding over spiritual stuff (duh that’s not my jam) but over our similar media consumption of movies, tv, video games. There was a huge overlap in what we like. We both surprised each other (because at first glance we both don’t seem like gamers or sci-fi fantasy horror junkies). Unfortunately in the usual chaos of landing and getting off the plane, we didn’t manage to say more than good bye. He even lamented “I wish I started talking to you at the beginning of the flight instead of just the last hour.”

    It’s nice to know that making friends in adulthood is possible. He’s actually the second person that I’ve hit it off with in the past month. Maybe I just need to get out more.

    • Welcome back!  I’ve had a few great conversations on planes but never kept in touch with any of them.  I’ve become more reserved in starting conversations since Trump but a Tibetan meditation instructor  probably doesn’t put off MAGA vibes! 

    • That reminds me of a time I was on one of my long road trips.  I have a little sticker on my pickup that says “B 700” because that’s a car level designation from a game called “Forza Horizon” that I play obsessively.  So, I’m at a rest stop and some square-looking dude sits down next to me and says he noticed my sticker.  We start talking about games and movies and this and that and we decided we would stop at a diner in the next town and have lunch.  We spent an easy 2 hours bullshitting and getting to know each other and then he told me if I’m ever in Lafayette, Indiana to look him up.  I forgot about it and then he called me some months later and insisted that I stop next time I was through there.  I met his family and he cooked on the grill and now he’s a friend.  It’s good to bond.

      • This sounds like an old Penthouse letter, but with two men and no sexy times.

        À propos of nothing, I find it incredibly erotic to be in a truck. Like an F-150. Not a tractor-trailer and not an SUV or a minivan. I don’t know why. I think it’s because the seating is so high that you think you are the King of the Road:

         

  4. Oh and I was traveling with my 6 month old who didn’t cry once. But you know who was disturbing the peace? A guy who slept through the whole 5hr plane ride which took off close to 7pm. He snored like a bear with sleep apnea. No one else got to sleep or enjoy their movies unless they turned their headsets up to deafening levels. I didn’t mind because I didn’t need to sleep on that flight.

  5. And one last travel note. Other travellers offered help any time I seemed to be struggling with my bags or stroller. People are good and kind and helpful. Even though I could (awkwardly) handle it on my own, I was very grateful and accepted their help. This trip left me feeling better about humanity.

    All of the Air Canada crew were also professional and friendly.

  6. I basically had a two-day work week. And the other one’s tomorrow.

    Besides “making the bridge” over the 4th of July, I’d had to scramble to free up my day today after another interpreter asked me personally to cover her for a 7-hour custody hearing because she was frozen out of her Mexican bank account and the only way to resolve it seemed to be in person . . . in Mexico, where she’d reluctantly booked an urgent flight. But then just yesterday I received word that they’d managed to find an interpreter from an agency (read: non-certified) to cover the hearing, so they wouldn’t need me anymore. I still went to court, though, because I was already slated to cover another hearing there an hour before, one that did require a certified interpreter. (There’d also been the worry from the office about conflicting schedules, which was probably why they ended up going with an agency. And, truth be told, the thing did end up lasting until an hour after the custody hearing would’ve begun, but that was mostly down to waiting for the inmate to be brought over from the fucking jail. And I don’t think they would’ve needed a certified interpreter as much as just a competent one — although thankfully I managed to function as both for this.)

    Anyway, after I got home and changed clothes, I dropped the invoice in the mail and treated myself to lunch at one of the hot spots in town, where there’s always a line outside. (It was peak lunch hour, too, so I was at the ass end of it.) And tonight I took advantage of my freed-up time by attending a webinar on Remote Simultaneous Interpretation, given in Spanish and from Mexico. I could follow it perfectly — and well enough to know that the technological set-up they were talking about was far above what I’m using now. But it was 1.5 hours long, and that’s exactly what I have left to fulfill in CEUs for my state certification for this year. Plus, I had to pay for the thing by making a fucking bank transfer to a (presumably non-frozen) account in Mexico — albeit for all of 10 bucks, including fees. Sunk cost fallacy? Maybe so. But I just now got the certificate of attendance for the thing — written in English, no less! Damn straight I’m using it.

     

    • Ten bucks is super cheap for something that counts toward continuing ed. Ms. Meme is a physical therapist, and usually the stuff that can apply toward her certification costs a couple hundred. And it takes up all or most of the day.

      • Gah, I just reread this and to my eye it looks like I’m complaining about your good fortune, @perdido. That was not my intent, and I’m glad you were able to find something inexpensive, accessible, and applicable for you. Sincere congrats there.

        Apparently I need more coffee.

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