foomart foomart

Okay, there are exactly three people in the entire Beth Israel facility on Union Square whom I would trust to find the word care in a dictionary. The rest of them are an impenetrable phalanx whose only function is to keep hoi polloi from getting near any actual doctors.

My P"C"P wants to find out why I'm slightly anemic. I told her I'd been anemic since I was a child. She wants to know why that one number is slightly out of range. She is not interested in any of the things that I went in there to talk about, she just wants to get to the bottom of this one fucking number. Apparently her method of finding the answer to this problem is to tell me to schedule myself for another battery of tests in May. No changes, medication, or advice of any kind, just more tests. Did she ask me what I eat? No. When I suggested that perhaps I could eat more foods higher in iron, cook more in cast iron pans, or even—stay with me now—take iron supplements, she was visibly crestfallen as she admitted those things might be helpful. Like I was cheating her out of watching her stupid number.

Meanwhile, I was in there because I was casually wondering what's been causing my hair to fall out by the handful. Me, I would guess it's probably something UNDER my skin that's out of whack, but she wrote me a referral to Dermatology. Even as she wrote it she told me it wasn't the right kind of referral and that I would have to walk to Dermatology, get an appointment, and then take this useless paper to the women down the hall with the headsets on to get a "computer-generated" referral. I actually did all this before I realized the appointment I'd made was for the last day of my insurance and that there was no chance of any subsequent visits. So I went back to Dermatology and cancelled my appointment. Somehow they were able to do that in a matter of seconds.

My P"C"P also wanted me to get a baseline mammogram. The first available appointment in Radiology is six months away. I only know this because when I walked up to Radiology and sat there waiting for anyone, anyone to acknowledge me, as medical and clerical personnel walked in and out with the same averted ignoring eyes as a rotten waitress who's about to go off shift, I heard her tell this to someone on the phone. Fine. You win. I went home. No appointments made, no plans to go back other than I have to go in tomorrow so someone can look at my arm and confirm that it hasn't blown up all red and that no, I wasn't exposed to my coworker's TB. But then I am going to try to get a copy of my records—stop laughing—before I leave that place for the last time. I've left the entire afternoon free for this task, and I bet I'll leave emptyhanded and in tears anyway.

I hope the new insurance is better, somehow. I'm not confident it will be. Look at what I found when I googled for the word holistic.

11:48 PM