7 September 2013

Saturday

7:30 AM

Ugh!

I woke up this morning with a sinus headache – just like yesterday morning. Just as most mornings this year. After a few weeks of me calling for Excedrin and a Claritin, the medical team thought maybe I had a sinus infection. They called for an X-ray from the portable lab. The machine was called in at six in the evening – very impressive. The results were determined but I was never informed. After the Physician's Assistant coming to my bedside and discussing with me my history with sinus headaches, my allergy history, and a few gentle jabs at discounting of my ideas based on my experience. Then, somewhat arrogantly, deferring to his education as the basis for his conclusions (which contained a whiff of medical school snobbery stacked up against my mere experiential understanding), the X-ray was recommended (as if I were actually going to buy this myself).

So when the results come back the next day - mind you, this is fancy new digital production, no developing films and courier carrying films to a radiologist, this is downloaded once the portable machine gets back downstairs to the truck, digitally processed then electronically zipped to a waiting radiologist just waiting on second shift scheduled hours to peek at the electronic version of the inside of the empty places in my forehead. After all of that production it must have been embarrassing to get the results.

Of course, the results weren't given to me, I am just the bearer of symptoms. I had to ask the nurse what the results were a few days later. “Oh, there was no infection.” Isn't that cute. All of this buildup, the use of new equipment, 21^st century technology, the all hours of the day kind of production, I suppose that the results of all this technological display was somewhat of a downer. I am somewhat disappointed by the willingness to practice mute silence of the results and the sharing of said results amongst only a certain audience, which did not include me was just beyond comprehensible.

So I am assured that my headaches are not the result of something dire. They are just headaches. Whew! That makes the almost daily forehead pain and when it creeps down into the bridge of my nose area and up into the top of my head and around to the temples not quite so worrying. It does, however, nothing to diminish the pain with which I deal regularly.

Oh well, I suppose that is what modern medicine is like these days. I wouldn't know, really, for in this facility I was not allowed to determine who to work with for my medical health like I always did when I was in charge of my life, before facility living. Somehow, since I have come to live in these care facilities, that old fashioned idea has been tossed out. I am assigned the doctor with whom I am expected to look to for my health care.

I have lost a lot of things beyond the required sale of my house, dissemination of my savings, the investments I had set aside for my retirement, all of the art I had collected, the photographs, the numerous interesting tchotchkes I had collected – so much that I had developed to look back on and remember moments of my life. All gone. Too many people inserting themselves into my life and acting like their influence was something I should be thrilled to have mucking about in my life. Or that I was some kind of ingrate for whom they have done what they have. Sounds like some sort of terrible twist imposed by a hidden control fiend malevolently bent on disrupting my life and depriving me of anything I knew of from my past.

So now its nearly ten in the morning, breakfast is completed, the medicine has been ingested, the Copaxone injected and my headache continues unabated.

Oh well …

Wish you were here.

One of the exhibits at this year's Burning Man