the passionate ailurophile

…it doesn’t hurt THAT bad, not so much where I can’t function.  Just enough to be annoying.  But when I think of the alternative, I’ll take this pain any day…

I know some of you wonder why, since I live near Boston, home of the so-called *BEST* medical care in the world, would I NOT want to go to one our our wonderful hospitals.  Well, having all of this cutting-edge medical care can be a double-edged sword for some of us.

Where do you think they get all of this cutting-edge research FROM?  They are FOREVER looking for guinea pigs to experiment on, for them to write about in the New England Journal of Medicine and all of that shit.  They’ve tried to do it to Mike before, when he was sent to Masshole General for a so-called *second opinion*.  And Masshole General is STILL not leaving him alone.  There was this thing in the mail today about how they wanted him to come in for this study about “reproductive endocrines”.  Not even for $500 (for four visits to that shithole) would he do this.  He says he never wants to see the inside of that place ever again.

This was the place where  he wasted a whole day getting a *pep talk* from various doctors, none of who examined him, to have surgery for cancer that’s not there.  And for which, we got a bill for close to $2000, and had to fight with the insurance company over it.

As for me, I am afraid that even if I’d gone to the ER at Hellrose-Wakefield right after the fall on New Year’s Eve, and they didn’t try to admit me…the fact remains that they are still INCAPABLE of just treating what someone comes in for, without having to take 600 blood tests to find anything else that might be wrong.    If you refuse, they won’t treat you for anything, plus, they’ll make sure that the insurance won’t pay.  We have actually been told this in the past.

We knew for years that he has Type 2 diabetes.  He’s been taking meds for it, no problems  But when he was incarcerated in the shithole in the summer of 2006, they forced him to speak to some stupid *diabetes educator*.  He ended up being put on insulin.  And then he was stuck in the hospital for a week longer than necessary, because they wouldn’t let him go until he was taught to inject himself.  But no one showed up to do it.  Also, his doctor didn’t show up for days on end, and this ass was the only one who could sign release papers.

The insulin thing was a disaster.  No matter where he tried injecting himself, after he did, it caused horrific muscle pains, which I’m sure hurt him a million times more than my arm does not.   Of course, he’s a lot more wussier than I am when it comes to pain, but I could tell that it was still painful for him.

The doctor didn’t care.  So Mike finally got fed up and quit injecting the insulin.  As soon as he stopped, so did the pain.  He did get shit when he had to go back to the hospital a year ago for the appendix thing, they tried to put him back on insulin, but he just never filled the scrip.  If they can’tbe arsed to figure out why taking it caused so much pain, then fuck it.

He does have one of those blood sugar testing things…he tests just fine just on the meds.  That’s why we think that the whole insulin thing was yet another *deal* that the doctor and the hospital had with a drug company, just like the whole Lipitor thing.  Tell me, how can we expect to trust these people, when it seems that they care more about making money than they do about a patient’s health and comfort?

So, if I’d gone there for my arm, they’d have insisted on running six million test, and if they found anything else wrong (which I sorta think they might), they’d either admit me to the shithole, or try to put me on a thousand meds that would probably make me puke twenty times a day.  Not to mention the lecture I’d get for not having my very own primary care physician.  I’d probably whack ‘em upside the head with my good arm if they did that, and then I’d be in jail.

If I KNEW that all they’d do is fix my arm, yeah, I’d have gone there.  But the fact is, these people want to OWN us.  These are the people who were in denial about the fact that Mike has a JOB, and kept calling the house to talk to him.  And then they’d call back and yell at me because he never called them back…even after I told them to call his work number.  And then, they’d call and try to get me to get him to let the doctors cut him open, just so they could look around inside him, and write a nice article about it for the New England Journal of Medicine.

What the fuck part of NO did these fuckers not get?  He had said NO, I told them he said NO, but they kept nagging me anyway.

Too much of our lives over the past couple of years have been wasted by being slaves to the health care system.  Too much of people telling us what to eat and what not to eat, what to drink and what not to drink, how to live, what meds to take…when Mike has followed these rules, he was miserable.  And so was I.

I’m going to live life my way for as long as I’m still here.  I’m not going to subject myself to people who might want to cut me open, tell me that I can’t have any more pizza, beer, or any other good stuph, dope me up, or otherwise try to fuck up my life as I know it.

If only they could just look at my arm and fix what’s wrong, I’d go and have it done.  But the fact is, that at least around here, that is NOT possible, so I have to make the choice to just live with it.

I just wish that people would realize this.  Maybe if you live in a small town, with only a small hospital, they don’t have time to bother people, so they just fix you and let you out.  Not so in the Boston area.

It really is a double-edged sword here.  We’re not as lucky as you might think we are!