“I would highly recommend this school because it teaches children not to question god’s loving will. The bible is the answer to all things. Also it teaches young women to be respectable and to understand their role in the community.”
Kill me fucking now.
So yesterday I had a “consultation appointment” with a new doctor, and after $10 and an hour of waiting, I spoke to him for 5 minutes. He does sports medicine and urgent care. He doesn’t know jack shit about bariatric surgery and how to get it. The good news is that he was completely up front with this information, and didn’t dick me around hemming and hawing about the whole thing. That beats the shit out of the last psycho bitch I saw. But I shouldn’t have had to go in for an appointment to find this information out. I specifically told the person I spoke to on the phone what I was looking for and this was the best she could apparently do. I’m just a bit annoyed by that fact. On the other hand, he gave me a possible name, and it’s one of the names the clinic gave me before. (The clinic gave me some suggestions after I’d already scheduled the appointment I went to yesterday.)
It’s hard, half the staff seem genuinely incapable of giving me the information I want, and the doctors are literally inaccessible outside these appointments. But there has to be a better way to get this information.
Oh and I found out how much I actually weigh. That was…. special.
mood: wavering somewhere between “blah” and “annoyed”, with occasional “mad cow” tendencies.
music: Black Eyed Peas – Anxiety
Directions to Lord Corrigan’s house:
First take the basket to hell, take the bowels exit and turn left for 3 clicks.
Wave to Satan and be damn sure to pay the toll, he gets pissy about that.
Then take the elevator down 10 levels and ask for “Lord Corrigan” from the first orc you see.
They are pretty good about escorting visitors in.
I feel like I should post something because things have happened since my last post, and that feels like a shitty place to leave off. But I don’t really feel like posting either.
The day after talking to the clinic, I was able to get some recommendations for doctors to try, and on the 30th I have a consultation visit with one of them to see what he has to say and how I feel about him. This is a good thing.
I need to call at least one other doctor and make an appointment I suppose, but I can’t quite bring myself to care.
I don’t seem to care about much these days. In fact, I think I’m sort of depressed.
Unusual because there’s a LAN party tomorrow.
Maybe that’ll help bring me out of this.
Mood: blah Music: the ticking of the clock. Only one hour of work left.
That wouldn’t have been that bad if that knowledge hadn’t come on the heels of finally hearing back from the Clinic. Apparently they never could come to a contract with my HMO, so I can’t have the surgery done there unless I 1) pay for it myself, or 2) switch insurance when open enrollment comes up in November.
The places I can have it done are Stanford, or UCSF. If I stay with my current insurance. And apparently my insurance makes me jump through a lot of hoops. Oh, and apparently most surgeons don’t recommend Lap-band for the amount of weight I need to lose. And the thing where my hair started falling out while I was in FA? I can expect that to happen again after the surgery. And the surgery that they do recommend, that has fewer problems than all the others, isn’t something that many (if any) insurances are willing to sign off on because it’s so damn new. And it’ll cost $17,000. Unfortunately, I’m already paying off a $17,000 purchase, (my car) and can’t afford another $300 a month payment.
I just feel like I’ve had so much emotionally vested in this since I started considering it that I don’t know what to do with myself.
Realistically, none of this is bad. I wanted info, I got info, and now it’s on me to decide what to do next.
But emotionally this just hurts. Weight, food and eating are such charged issues for me that the only way I could cope was to have a set idea of what I was going to do. That made thinking about it, talking about it, and doing something about it safe. Now that I don’t know what comes next, it doesn’t feel safe, and that scares me. Plus I have several choices, and may have to consider options that I had dismissed before out of fear.
Heh, and I thought that this was an easy cop-out way of dealing with my weight and eating. (I was both excited by, and ashamed of that thought. On the one hand, I found a way to lose weight! On the other hand, I sort of feel that I should be able to handle my weight problem myself. The reality is neither as I understand it: the process will involve a lot of work on my part, and now that I think about it, I’ve met very few people who could cope with this scale of food dysfunction on their own without some sort of help.)
Mostly, I just feel like the rug has been pulled out from under me. And I’m horrified that I’m a hopeless case, and even though I know I’m doing it, I’m afraid I’m so out of control that I’ll actually kill myself through obesity. I don’t want to be a statistic.
I feel lost. I’m sure I’ll figure out what to do next soon. There are options.
But right now I just feel lost.
It’s not that important I guess, but its kind of annoying.
So the saga continues.
I decided the best way to find a doctor who could play nice with the weight loss surgery center was to call the surgery center and ask for their recommendations. Of course, that would require that somewhere down the line, I actually managed to speak to a human being. 1 month and several messages and emails later, I still hadn’t gotten a hold of anyone other than the machine. The one thing all the machines had in common was a direct phone number to talk to the surgeons. I hadn’t called it because I was pretty sure they couldn’t schedule me for anything, but after a month of trying to contact these people and getting no where, I decided to try any phone number I could.
I’m glad I did. There’s a human being answering the phone there. She let me know that the person who normally fields these calls at the clinic has been out on leave. There was supposed to be someone handling the appointments and scheduling while the person on leave was out, but apparently that wasn’t happening. She did let me know that the person on leave is supposed to be back later this week. She also did me a huge favor by letting me give her a short list of doctors I have available to me in my HMO, and said she’d present them to some of the surgeons there and see if any of them had a recommendation for a doctor who plays well with the clinic. That’s all I want at this point.
She hasn’t called back yet, but then again, it’s hardly been 15 minutes.
I hope she does call back. On the other hand, I’m sort of scared that she’ll call back. Then I’ll have to make another doctor’s appointment and start this all over again. Because god knows this went oh so well last time….
Still, this is a good thing. Maybe if I keep reminding myself of that it’ll start to feel that way.
In which I discover that there are worse things in life than Kaiser.
So after watching the afore mentioned documentary, I started looking up more info about Lap-band. One of the things I found was that the John Muir Weight Loss Surgery Center performs the surgery. This is great. My insurance allows me to pick my doctor, but based on the location of the doctor, I get assigned to a medical group. I happen to be assigned to the “John Muir/Mt Diablo” medical group, which seems like things should work out nicely.
I spent a lot of time reading their web site, and finally got up the nerve to fill out the online form requesting more information and a screening interview. The site informed me that it could take 3 – 5 business days for them to get back to me.
2 weeks later I still hadn’t heard from them.
They talk about the assorted support staff you can see there, but it’s by referral only. So I decided to make an appointment with my doctor.
Now, I’ve never actually met this doctor before. I had decided I wanted a woman doctor, and there were only three to pick from in the John Muir/Mt Diablo medical group. And one of them wasn’t accepting new patients. I flipped a coin and selected Dr. Teresa Rudlowski. Next time I’m picking tails on the coin toss.
Last time I tried to schedule an appointment with this doctor, I discovered that she works in Concord only 2 days a week, and the rest of her time is spent in Fairfield of all places. As I recall, her office was unable to give me a referral to a doctor that my insurance would cover. (They gave me several referrals. They just all turned out to be 1) retired or 2) not in my medical group.) Still, I’d never actually met the woman and decided to schedule an appointment anyway. HUGE mistake.
It took two weeks before they could see me. And some time between when I scheduled the appointment and actually had the appointment I managed to lose my Pacificare card. (oops.) I didn’t realize I didn’t have it until about an hour before the appointment. So I did the only thing I could think to on such short notice: called Pacificare and asked what my ID number was, and for any other information they thought my doctor’s office might need.
To illustrate how incredibly impressive this particular tactic was, let me just point out that I spent the entire damn day having panic attacks about this point. I didn’t go to work that day because I just couldn’t cope. So I don’t think the part where I forgot to write down the Pacificare phone number was a gigantic oversight. Except it was. When I got there, they needed to call Pacificare to request some info, and couldn’t because 1) they didn’t have a computer, and 2) they’d mislaid their Pacificare directory. Seriously. No computer. The doctor didn’t have one in her office either. I don’t know how a doctor’s office makes it into the 21st century in the bay area without a computer, but somehow they’d done it. The appointment went downhill from there.
I filled out obscene quantities of paperwork, dredging up all sorts of fun familial medical history. They then put me in the exam room, which had all the amenities you’d expect from a 1960’s East German medical exam room. The doctor, an older, white haired woman with a heavy German accent came in, and sat next to me, briefly perused my paperwork, ignored the page where I wrote down WHY I CAME TO THIS APPOINTMENT, and began muttering about how I needed a full panel of lab tests. None of this did a damn thing to make me relax.
Eventually I started ignoring her muttering and tried to tell her why I was there. (Including the fact that sometimes when I stress out, my heart does this weird thing where it can’t seem to beat for just a few seconds, before finally taking a beat and continuing normally. It happens once every few months, usually in stressful situations. It happened 3 or 4 times while I was in her office.) I mentioned that I wanted a referral to the Surgery Center. I mentioned that I wasn’t sleeping well at night. I mentioned the heart thing. I mentioned that I was *having* the heart thing right there in the office.
She then murmured something about knowing a woman who got an apartment next door to a gym and who worked out an hour a day. She ignored the heart thing. She mumbled something about a neat new drug that had just come out for sleep issues and mentioned something about me doing a sleep study to check for sleep apnea. She then started telling me that I had to lose 30 pounds to get the referral. (no, I need to lose 30 pounds to get the surgery. I know they make you lose weight before hand, to prove that you’re willing to work at this. The surgery helps, but you still have to be able to put in effort. That’s fine. But I should be able to talk to these people without having to lose 30 pounds to learn more about the fucking procedure.) The problem was, she didn’t have a scale that went up high enough to weigh me. And rather than tell me where I could go and get weighed, she suggested that maybe Mt Diablo would have a scale, and perhaps I could stop and ask them. Seriously.
By this point I’d been there more than an hour, and was SO stressed that my period, which had finished a few days before, started again. I think the proper term is hemorrhaging. The cramps were hellish, and the rest of the visit was spent in excruciating pain (for which they could give me NOTHING?!?), while I kept out pacing my damn tampons. I kept having to go to the bathroom again and again to deal with this problem, while the nurse, who conveniently forgot to mention that I’d need to be providing a urine sample when I asked to use the bathroom BEFORE my appointment, kept shoving urine sample collection cups at me and giving me dirty looks when I said I was sorry but that I didn’t need to go.
The only plus side to the period nightmare was that it stopped the irregular stress heartbeats. I’ve never done that twice in one day, let alone 4 or so times in 20 minutes.
In the end she couldn’t figure out how to refer me to, well, anything. She couldn’t give me a referral to the Surgery Center, she couldn’t give me a referral to the sleep study, she couldn’t give me a referral to the Cardiac center to check my heart. (Instead she had the nurse try to use an EKG machine they had, but the machine just kept complaining of a paper jam, so they asked me to come back another day to have a tech who was out try it. Yes, because I had SO MUCH FUN on my last visit.) She couldn’t even give me a referral to a fucking dietitian. The only “referral” she could give me was to an Ob/Gyn for a pap smear. Except I don’t actually need a referral from her to get a pap smear. I’m allowed to call and make that appointment on my own.
In the end, she gave me an extensive panel of lab tests, and a prescription for Ambien, and that was only because I refused to leave until she gave me something for the not sleeping, and since she can’t figure out referrals, it’ll have to be chemical.
I’m not going back. I canceled the appointment to return for the EKG, and I’ll be getting a new general practitioner. What a nightmare.
Mood : pissed off Music : Soundtrack to the Sam & Max Freelance Police games
I’ve decided to look into lap-band surgery.
Because I really don’t want to have my first heart attack by 40.
I’ve been agonizing about this for weeks. I saw some show (on the Food Network of all things, I think) about childhood obesity, and one guy ended up having lap-band surgery. I’d seen ads before, but I’d always ignored them because most of the gastric surgeries are rather dangerous (especially to me as I tend to be a binge eater) and as such are rather scary. I could picture myself popping stomach staples, and the idea of just bypassing a chunk of my intestinal tract scares the crap out of me.
I know the weight is dangerous. Incredibly dangerous. I’m so far past the border of morbid obesity that I almost need a new category to be in. But I can’t help it, I just can’t bring myself to do things with insanely dangerous side effects. (Fen-Phen comes to mind. Kaiser offered it to me as an option the summer before they discovered how dangerous it was. I read the long list of Really Bad ™ side effects and refused to do it.)
But the surgery described in the show wasn’t as scary as the other stuff I’d heard about. They put a band around the upper portion of the stomach, and using saline, they can constrict or loosen the band. It creates a pouch up near the top of the stomach which makes you feel full with less food. The food drops down into the bottom half of your stomach, and is processed as normal, so you don’t skip any portion of your digestive tract. The most dangerous part about it is the part where you have to have laproscopic surgery.
This, suffice to say, is much more along the lines of Something I Can Cope With ™.
More later.
I received an email consisting of a grand total of two sentences from Rita today. I didn’t mean to diatribe, but it’s been on my mind, so I’m sharing the bulk of my response to her. Yes, I’m probably nuts, but I’m 99.9% sure this is true.
And I can’t say I’m surprised your plans changed. The weeks of Beltane and Samhain are just so prone to insanity anyway. Honest to god, the reason the freeway melted? Beltane. I’m sure of it. And it’s not just the Maze being in pieces. Last time my commute was routinely *this* *fucking* *nuts* was the week of Samhain. Yesterday I got trapped in Alameda for two hours when an accident happened in the Posey Tube, and because EVERYONE then tried to head for the bridges, every North-South Avenue in Alameda became a parking lot. A car was on fire at the top of the highway 4 grade when I cruised past… the cops, the driver, the tow truck driver, and the paramedics all just standing around, shooting the shit, watching it burn as they waited for the fire trucks to come back. And what were they coming back from? Apparently two or three hours earlier in that same place, a small plane had to make an emergency landing *on* *4*.
This morning I left my house at 6:30. I got to work at 9.
Oh, and I’ve had a major deadline appear out of NO WHERE every damn day this week. Of course, just as I finish, my boss announces “just kidding! It was pushed back to tomorrow! Oh, but since you have time, do this before the new deadline.” And I can’t even be pissed at him because it’s not him changing his mind, its just as he gets more info on what we need, there’s another step.
This week is fucking insane. I remember that essay about the Lammas Men: “if you don’t happen to Lammas, Lammas happens to you!” And I suppose it’s true. But Lammas, hell, even Ostara, which I never celebrate but always happens to me anyway, have NOTHING on Samhain and Beltane. These are the weeks I always end up having high blood pressure from the traffic and a breakdown from life’s general insanity. Oh, and I usually manage to be bleeding for them too. Because it’s appropriate in some sick way.
It’s true. I know the sabbats are insane. But these two take the fucking cake.
Mood : uncomfortable Music : Blink 182: Action (I’m Feeling It)