Opining Online

I haven’t yet posted why my original 3-4 week Arizona vacation turned into a 6 week plus adventure.

There’s some backstory here that needs ‘splaining. First of all, let’s get the planned itinerary out of the way. I left on Mar 28th and arrived on Mar 29th. On Mar 25th, I got notice from my insurance (Tricare Prime) that I needed to find a new primary care doctor by April 1. The letter was dated several weeks earlier. 

This pissed me off because on March 22, I’d seen my primary care doc and got a bunch of blood tests done pertaining to a chronic problem. Had I known I was about to be “dumped” from treatment at the MTF (which I’d been coerced into 4 years before) I would not have bothered.

Anyway… with little more than five days notice, I have to find another primary care physician. First, I contact the physician my husband has used for years. That’s a no go. Then I find the largest group practicing near my home and affiliated with the hospital nearest my home. I contact them and am told that each physician decides whether to accept new patients and their insurance. After a few denials from specific physicians in that group, I’m finally informed that none of the 13 will take me on.

By this time, I’m in Arizona. So, I search again and this time find a physician who will take me. I fill out the paperwork and am informed by Tricare that if the paperwork is received before the 2oth of April, the assignment to the new PCP will be valid on May 1.

That’s wonderful and I make an appointment with the new doc for May 6. I plan to be home on April 28th… exactly a month after I left. Except for the perhaps wasteful blood tests, everything is good.

Except… on April 25th, I am running a fever and have stomach pain. Monday, April 26th, the pain is worse, the fever a bit higher. Since I don’t think I have a primary care physician to call for a referral to an urgent care clinic, I call Tricare directly. I am informed that since April 17th when I submitted my request (that I was told would be effective May 1) I do have a PCP and that I must get any referrals from her.

Unfortunately, she hasn’t seen me before and ethically can’t make any referrals. (This is another topic…) and therefore I can’t get a referral from anyone. I am advised that since this is the case I should go to the ER since that doesn’t require a referral. However, it’s been pounded into me that using the ER for routine care is a bad, bad, wasteful thing and that Tricare might not cover it. Since I don’t think my problem is an emergency, I’m not that thrilled with that advice. But I’m also worried that I won’t feel like driving 1200 miles unless I get feeling better.

So I go to the nearest ER which is less than a mile from my daughter’s house. Why I should have chosen an ER much further away may be the subject of another post. Let’s just say that the close hospital didn’t have a great reputation. But… I was only going to probably get a prescription for an antibiotic and a suggestion I follow up with my PCP when I get home, right?

Continue reading “How I Ended Up Without A Primary Care Physician And The Worst Hospital I’ve Ever Been In”

My husband got around to replacing the toilet that had been just pretending to flush. I had no idea that toilets could wear out. I knew that the innards in the tanks might need replacing periodically, but not that other parts could wear out.

Anyway, it’s an older house and the bolts holding the toilet to the floor had disintegrated. I’m sure there might have been an easier way, or more elegant way, of removing such a toilet, but my darling chose the sledgehammer method. That was Day 1.

Day 2 involved chiseling out the bolts and cleaning up shards of vitreous china.

Day 3 should have been the easiest — set the new toilet in position and bolt it down — a job that should have taken less than an hour.

Not so, as standards have changed. Something on our toilet was 6 1/2 inches and the corresponding part on the new toilet was 6 inches. Nothing lined up. After 5 hours of chipping away 50 years of I don’t want to know what, a new something (a flange?) was installed and the new toilet was set.

All’s well that ends well. But our plans to replace the toilet in the other bathroom have been put on hold. I’m sure those plans will be revised to include paying for a professional installation. And they will include my absence during the procedure!

Yesterday evening, around 8pm, I decided to clean the stove. And the vent over the stove. And the side of the stove and the side of the cabinet it stands against. And behind the stove. And under the stove.

And now… it’s early this morning, my back hurts, my hands hurt, and I’ve noticed that the walls and cabinets also look a bit dingy and greasy.

Why, oh why didn’t I just turn out the lights and go to bed early?

Not all leaf blowers, just my neighbor’s. I hate the way she uses it and when she uses, but I especially hate how often and how long she uses it.

She rakes her yard with it 2 or 3 times a week. After she’s got several little rows of leaves and pine straw accumulated in two hours of blowing, her husband mows over them with their mulching bagging mower. In fact, he mows over them and the entire lawn three or four times.

I’ve seen her chase him, blowing one leaf for him to mulch.

This is only going to get worse now that fall is here. There will be new leaves and pine straw for them to chase and mulch every day. For hours. I’d hate the lawnmower too if it weren’t so much quieter than the leaf blower.

Anyway, so much for my plans to sit outside on this beautifully cool Saturday afternoon and read. Thank goodness our house has been “sound-proofed”.

UPDATE: On this wonderful Sunday afternoon, I thought I’d try reading outside again. My neighbor across the street fired up his leaf blower to clean off his driveway (a legitimate use, IMHO) and dadgummit he was joined by husband deciding to blow the leaves away from our house (another legitimate use.)

I sat outside for a few minutes waiting for the third leaf blower to join them so I could listen in three-part unharmony.

Oh well… maybe tomorrow. OOPS. It is supposed to rain tomorrow.

Though it couldn’t have been said in a nicer way, I think my favorite bartender would like for me to get a life. Or something. Something like he way overestimates the blogging value of my accumulated sticky notes.

The most meaningful one (but one I actually threw away) was a series of question marks. I will reproduce it here for you:

?????

“WTF” would have been somewhat more informative. I think. Perhaps what I really need is to spend more time drinking in bars employing really great and wise bartenders.

As noted here, I seem to express myself better in comments on others’ blogs. I hope that’s a passing phase.

There is nothing that you do that does not require the use of stomach muscles. This includes moving your eyeballs from left to right.

What gives relief from pain in one area will eventually cause pain in another.

After you wake up a bit from the surgical anesthesia and get a dose or two of strong narcotics, you may be fooled into thinking everything is going to be just fine and want to go home.

A small incision is one that runs from the bra line to the belly button.

They don’t serve margaritas in the recovery room, but they’ve got some really good stuff in syringes.

Eating a cracker with zero saliva is very unpleasant.

I will survive.

I think I will just blog randomly about pet peeves or other crap that comes to mind. I have a head cold and a headache, too.

Want your website to look unprofessional and render it useless? Don’t date any of your articles! It’s so easy.

Want to sound really intelligent? Misuse “begs the question” when speaking or writing. I’m amazed at the number of supposedly educated people who use this when they mean “raises” the question.

Also, write “make due” when you need to use “make do” as it shows how well you’re making do with what you have. This is especially effective when criticizing someone else for not being as righteously frugally environmentally concerned as you are.

By all means, when someone who has a lot more money than you have decides to spend it on something you disapprove of, let the world know how much good they could have done if only they were as thoughtful as you would have been with that much money. Then, in the next paragraph write about how ”the left” and the government shouldn’t be taking people’s money away from them to spend on what “they” think it should be spent on.

to be continued… I’m sure.

Add computer and operating system to the title.

I hate it when my computer starts “acting up” and especially when I’m not exactly sure why, where, or when it’s going to.

List of current irritations:

Shockwave hangs when I’m using Chrome.

Facebook won’t load some profile or photo pages in IE.

Writing posts loses paragraph breaks in Chrome.

Ancestry.com is slow, their search options suck and navigation is a pain.

Shutterfly’s Family Pages don’t load correctly in IE, Chrome, or Firefox. I get the best results from Chrome, but get Java errors in all three. I’ve downloaded and re-installed Java several times.

Gmail is unavailable too often.

Yahoo mail keeps telling me the last session wasn’t shut down properly.

XP Pro (service pack 3) recognizes my printer as new hardware on every boot, but when I just cancel the box, my printer works fine.

It’s not only a pain, but painful for me, task to get to the back of my box to plug in my external harddrive to make backups. But I’m going to have to do it because I think I just need to reinstall everything. Well, not everything, because there’s a lot of junk on there, including 3 versions of Microsoft Office.

I need a new version of Acrobat. I’m getting too many things not readable by 5.0, but I’m also afraid the latest version will not have my favorite features and expanded ones of features I hate, and new ones I’ll have to learn.

Should I do a clean install of XP, spend a day getting a gazillion service packs and hotfixes… then spend another day (or two) installing my software and downloading all the upgrades for them?

My processor (P4, 2.2) and my harddrive (120 gig) are 8 1/2 years old, the motherboard is 5 years old. I’ve 1.28 gig ram. No DVD recorder (there’s one on my laptop, but I can’t type worth a damn on it.) Or should I beg for a new computer and new software?

And did I mention I’m out of wine? (Though, apparently well-stocked with whine.)