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About two weeks ago now I woke up with New and Improved Extra Strength Low Back Pain. There is nothing quite like a mild inability to move without swearing to finally get you to put yourself in the hands of Trained Medical Professionals-- in the hope that not even they could really make it any worse.
Treatment proceeds swimmingly, just swimmingly. The chiropractor takes my insurance card and sends the bills, with all codes properly entered, to Blue Cross. He has me fill out forms with all my basic information. He then sends me to the radiologist where again the card is presented, the bill is sent, and the basic information entered on what appear to be exactly the same forms the chiropractor used. Then on to my primary care physician, where I don't have to fill out the basic information-- he has all that, and the others could had gotten it by asking him, but never mind, let it pass. Again the insurance card proffered, the bills gloriously spangled with the proper treatment codes sent on to Blue Cross.
Perhaps because he didn't make me fill out the basic information again-- and we all know that no medical treatment can be any good if you don't fill out forms for it-- he had me fill out a questionaire on any surgeries I might have had, plus any metal implants, old war wounds with shrapnel, grains of steel I might have caught in my eyes, that sort of thing. Then on to the physical therapist and the hospital.
At the physical therapist I filled out forms with all the basic information and proffered the insurance card, whereupon bills were sent to Blue Cross with proper treatment codes affixed.
Thence to the hospital, for a pre-admission screening, where I filled out my basic information and filled out the questionare on shrapnel, metal implants, grinder grains in the eyes, etc. that I had already filled out at my doctor's office. The insurance card was proffered etc etc etc.
I was by this time thinking that once, just once, I'd like to walk into one of these places and have the first question be "What's wrong?" or "How can we help you?" instead of "What's your insurance?" But I was immediately sorry for this attitude, which I am sure you will agree was most ungracious and ungrateful.
The next day, today, I went back to the hospital for an MRI of my lower back. I filled out forms with all my basic medical information, a questionaire on my surgical history (none), and a questionaire about whether I had ever had war wounds with shrapnel, or had metal implants, or an accident with grinding tools or other machine tools that might have landed metal fragments in my eyes.
I was beginning to wonder why they had me filling out the same information over and over again. After all, it would make sense for me to fill out the forms at admissions if somehow the hospital could manage to create the advanced technology necessary to get the form from there the whole fifty feet down the corridor to Radiology, where they had me fill in the full set of forms again. Not to mention the possibility of getting those same forms from one of the other places I'd completed them over the past few days. But I finally began to understand. It was all deliberate. They were cross-examining me, checking me for guilt, trying to see whether my name or my date of birth would start to change around as the pressure mounted.
I felt especially guilty about the metal fragments. It's like the cops asking you for the 33rd time where you were the night of the murder-- you start to wonder yourself whether you might be guilty of the crime. And how could I know, really? How could I be sure I wasn't guilty of the crime of metal-embeddedism? I had taken shop courses and I have tools of my own out in the garage. It is always possible that I caught a grain of steel in the eye at one time or another. And there might be a silver plate in my skull. You can never know about these things, really; the sort of accident that would get you a silver plate in the skull could be severe enough and cause enough head trauma that you wouldn't remember it. I had fallen down the stairs backward as a toddler, and there were a few other falls and car crashes and other accidents the details of which were a bit hazy. Maybe I did have a silver plate in my skull! It would explain so much about my personality and my behavior too.
By this time I was getting shifty and evasive about the whole silver plate thing-- or maybe pins in my leg bones, you can never really be sure what happened when you were unconscious getting the silver plate in the skull that you've also forgotten. And then there could always have been space aliens leaving listening devices embedded in my flesh. Or the time I stepped on a nail when I was eight-- was I sure they got ALL of it back out?
But us hardened criminal types can be pretty fierce about sticking to our alibis. The police-- I mean, the medical tech-- couldn't shake me in my claims of innocence on the metal fragment end of things. So I was divested of my pocketful of pens, my pants, and was forthwith stuffed into the MRI machine.
Noisy thing, the MRI. To help blank that out they played music for me. It tells you much about this town that their music selection for Calming Music to be Stuffed into an MRI By included so much country music that there were five different Willie Nelson albums alone, but the entire classical music library consisted of one forlorn disc labeled, I kid you not, Classic Classical.
That's what I had, heard over a set of headphones that had as good quality as you'd expect for speakers designed to operate in magnetic fields so strong they'd fling any steel or normal magnet across the room at velocities approximating that of a .45 Automatic slug ten yards downrange from the muzzle. I recognized the tranquil parts of the William Tell Overture, Pachabel's Canon, a bit of Afternoon of a Faun-- the Bugs Bunny Classical Collection, basically.
The MRI makes all sorts of noises, most of them unpleasant. Probably the most alarming, pun intended, was that for a while it made the exact sound that the alarm buzzer on the Ghostbusters' ghost containment facility did, just before the whole thing blew sky-high. Second most alarming was the Giant Dispos-All Noise, which given that the MRI kind of resembles a huge Dispos-All on its side, could have been very alarming indeed. If I hadn't been starting to fall asleep about this time.
I woke up a bit thinking about the Dispos-All thing. The image of being fed, feet-first, into a human-sized garbage grinder was not very pacifying. However, to plagiarize![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
morganalilith, I comforted myself with the idea that this was no doubt somebody somewhere's great fetish, and I relaxed to let the long noisy drowse continue.
Well, that's over, and maybe in a few days I'll know what, if anything, is really wrong with my lower back.
I'm sure you'll agree treatment has been going as well as anybody could have hoped. All the forms are filled and everybody gets paid. Of course nobody's done JACK CRAP to even TRY THE SLIGHTEST LITTLE THING to END the PAIN, but that's just a trifle, the merest trifle. I'm sure no reasonable person would pay the slightest heed to it.
Treatment proceeds swimmingly, just swimmingly. The chiropractor takes my insurance card and sends the bills, with all codes properly entered, to Blue Cross. He has me fill out forms with all my basic information. He then sends me to the radiologist where again the card is presented, the bill is sent, and the basic information entered on what appear to be exactly the same forms the chiropractor used. Then on to my primary care physician, where I don't have to fill out the basic information-- he has all that, and the others could had gotten it by asking him, but never mind, let it pass. Again the insurance card proffered, the bills gloriously spangled with the proper treatment codes sent on to Blue Cross.
Perhaps because he didn't make me fill out the basic information again-- and we all know that no medical treatment can be any good if you don't fill out forms for it-- he had me fill out a questionaire on any surgeries I might have had, plus any metal implants, old war wounds with shrapnel, grains of steel I might have caught in my eyes, that sort of thing. Then on to the physical therapist and the hospital.
At the physical therapist I filled out forms with all the basic information and proffered the insurance card, whereupon bills were sent to Blue Cross with proper treatment codes affixed.
Thence to the hospital, for a pre-admission screening, where I filled out my basic information and filled out the questionare on shrapnel, metal implants, grinder grains in the eyes, etc. that I had already filled out at my doctor's office. The insurance card was proffered etc etc etc.
I was by this time thinking that once, just once, I'd like to walk into one of these places and have the first question be "What's wrong?" or "How can we help you?" instead of "What's your insurance?" But I was immediately sorry for this attitude, which I am sure you will agree was most ungracious and ungrateful.
The next day, today, I went back to the hospital for an MRI of my lower back. I filled out forms with all my basic medical information, a questionaire on my surgical history (none), and a questionaire about whether I had ever had war wounds with shrapnel, or had metal implants, or an accident with grinding tools or other machine tools that might have landed metal fragments in my eyes.
I was beginning to wonder why they had me filling out the same information over and over again. After all, it would make sense for me to fill out the forms at admissions if somehow the hospital could manage to create the advanced technology necessary to get the form from there the whole fifty feet down the corridor to Radiology, where they had me fill in the full set of forms again. Not to mention the possibility of getting those same forms from one of the other places I'd completed them over the past few days. But I finally began to understand. It was all deliberate. They were cross-examining me, checking me for guilt, trying to see whether my name or my date of birth would start to change around as the pressure mounted.
I felt especially guilty about the metal fragments. It's like the cops asking you for the 33rd time where you were the night of the murder-- you start to wonder yourself whether you might be guilty of the crime. And how could I know, really? How could I be sure I wasn't guilty of the crime of metal-embeddedism? I had taken shop courses and I have tools of my own out in the garage. It is always possible that I caught a grain of steel in the eye at one time or another. And there might be a silver plate in my skull. You can never know about these things, really; the sort of accident that would get you a silver plate in the skull could be severe enough and cause enough head trauma that you wouldn't remember it. I had fallen down the stairs backward as a toddler, and there were a few other falls and car crashes and other accidents the details of which were a bit hazy. Maybe I did have a silver plate in my skull! It would explain so much about my personality and my behavior too.
By this time I was getting shifty and evasive about the whole silver plate thing-- or maybe pins in my leg bones, you can never really be sure what happened when you were unconscious getting the silver plate in the skull that you've also forgotten. And then there could always have been space aliens leaving listening devices embedded in my flesh. Or the time I stepped on a nail when I was eight-- was I sure they got ALL of it back out?
But us hardened criminal types can be pretty fierce about sticking to our alibis. The police-- I mean, the medical tech-- couldn't shake me in my claims of innocence on the metal fragment end of things. So I was divested of my pocketful of pens, my pants, and was forthwith stuffed into the MRI machine.
Noisy thing, the MRI. To help blank that out they played music for me. It tells you much about this town that their music selection for Calming Music to be Stuffed into an MRI By included so much country music that there were five different Willie Nelson albums alone, but the entire classical music library consisted of one forlorn disc labeled, I kid you not, Classic Classical.
That's what I had, heard over a set of headphones that had as good quality as you'd expect for speakers designed to operate in magnetic fields so strong they'd fling any steel or normal magnet across the room at velocities approximating that of a .45 Automatic slug ten yards downrange from the muzzle. I recognized the tranquil parts of the William Tell Overture, Pachabel's Canon, a bit of Afternoon of a Faun-- the Bugs Bunny Classical Collection, basically.
The MRI makes all sorts of noises, most of them unpleasant. Probably the most alarming, pun intended, was that for a while it made the exact sound that the alarm buzzer on the Ghostbusters' ghost containment facility did, just before the whole thing blew sky-high. Second most alarming was the Giant Dispos-All Noise, which given that the MRI kind of resembles a huge Dispos-All on its side, could have been very alarming indeed. If I hadn't been starting to fall asleep about this time.
I woke up a bit thinking about the Dispos-All thing. The image of being fed, feet-first, into a human-sized garbage grinder was not very pacifying. However, to plagiarize
morganalilith, I comforted myself with the idea that this was no doubt somebody somewhere's great fetish, and I relaxed to let the long noisy drowse continue.Well, that's over, and maybe in a few days I'll know what, if anything, is really wrong with my lower back.
I'm sure you'll agree treatment has been going as well as anybody could have hoped. All the forms are filled and everybody gets paid. Of course nobody's done JACK CRAP to even TRY THE SLIGHTEST LITTLE THING to END the PAIN, but that's just a trifle, the merest trifle. I'm sure no reasonable person would pay the slightest heed to it.
