Author: Paul

There’s a couple of things about my current healthcare misadventure really bothering me.  One I understand, the other I do not.  I understand how the healthcare system is not set up to care for patients like me.  It is dealing with a big population of crybabies who cannot stop complaining after they stub their toe.  No biggie.  I get that.  What I do not understand is how torture became an acceptable course of diagnostics.

I’ve been left to rot, suffering with a painful, debilitating, un-treated back injury all year – forced through hip replacement rehab, where the biggest obstacle was not a freshly installed prosthesis.  Let them go until something happens or they scream loud enough to get someone’s attention?  Has it really gotten that bad?  Have the diags ballooned to such expense doctors are being discouraged from ordering them?  Must be, because I have this uncanny ability to know when I am hurt.  It’s called being a conscious human being.  That part is getting real old.

These things typically take a long time to heal – if they do at all.  The bad ones don’t.  This is a bad one.  Read the goddamn MRI report.  Still no medical attention as called out in said report, 9 months on – after seeing what, 7 doctors now?  I’m losing count.  Oh wait – not entirely true – I got a bottle of muscle relaxant pills from my new PC.  They do help a little.  But they are TOXIC, like most pharmaceuticals, and are only to be used for a max of 3 weeks.  It’s something, I suppose.

Read the goddamn Annular Tear lesson.  Dr. Mork is telling my story better than I can.  So, without enough time to read and just do your fucking jobs, the un-written policy appears to be, at least in part:  “Ensure diagnostic torture protocol and procedures are strictly adhered to whenever it starts looking like we screwed up.”

(Late Update:  as expected, after the new referral from last week didn’t show up, a call to the Loveland community desk or whatever they are calling it this year, found it in “status unknown” state.  I repeated all my information to the nice lady for the eleventy-seventh time while she set the wheels in motion.  Again.  And again, and again…)

Thinking back from the start of this fiasco, it all makes sense now – particularly the part where they start withholding pain med to help gauge your take-home prescription.  That is permanently seared into my memory.

It’s so easy to slip through the cracks.  I feel like I’ve been fighting a losing battle against the system all year and gotten to the point where just struggling through daily life and trying to deal with this at the same time has left  me so physically and mentally exhausted I’m ready to throw in the towel.  After seeing the KMS gatekeeper Dr. Knight Tuesday, we’ll do the EMG test, and see what they say about that.  I imagine it will be either inconclusive, or find some unrelated issue I don’t care about, like the carpal tunnel last time.  Guess what she said when I told her my pain was getting worse and definitely not chronic but acute?  “So this has been going on since January, huh – looks like it’s chronic now.”

Fortunately, the first real ray of hope since July came Thursday with Dr Thieman, my new PC out of Loveland.  I’m not a religious person, but by some miracle apparently, he was familiar with something at least similar to my issue and and is sending me to see a spine guy who might recognize it as well.

After the MRI finding was made back in June, I’d have let Brinkis get away with blaming it on me!  All he had to say was something like “…occasionally we see this in older patients with weakening structures due to disc degeneration, etc.  It’s not too serious, just takes a long time to heal, so now we need to…”  And that would have been the end of it.  This is starting to feel like an “innocent until proven guilty” proposition where nobody even wants to look at the evidence.  They are maintaining my toxic annular tear innocence at all cost.  Too bad I’m the one paying the bill.