Being Amber Rhea

I’ve told it all to Rusty. I’ve told a good chunk of it to Jenny via IM, and hopefully made some sense amid the typos and inevitable disjointedness of IMing while at work. I’ve scrawled some of it in my real journal (that is, until my hand started hurting like hell; I can hardly believe I used to write 20+ page letters to friends, back before any of us had email).

The original placeholder title of this post was “In the VA on July 4th.” As I said on Twitter, the irony was most certainly not lost on me that my dad was in the VA Hospital on July 4th, with much of the place closed down and only a skeleton crew working, and the asshole intern who looked like he just walked off the set of Grey’s Anatomy (but not in a good way) saying they can’t do anything because of the holiday weekend. There were signs everyone that said, “Our Mission: To Do Everything We Can For Veterans,” and patriotic decorations of the sort you find in elementary schools, with bubbly cut-out American-flag-patterned letters stapled to those big sheets of paper that come on rolls, spelling out, “We Love Our Veterans!”

That is some terrible irony. I guess the only way it could be worse is if it had been Memorial Day weekend.

“Support our troops” means put a fucking yellow ribbon magnet on the back of your SUV (yes, it’s so cliché to even say it at this point, we’ve all heard it before), not actually providing care and coverage to the infirm. Oh right my dad gets a piddly $200 a month benefit from the government for being exposed to Agent Orange in Vietnam; “oops, our bad for exposing you to a potentially deadly chemical; here’s two hundred bucks!”

And leaving the infuriating irony aside, this whole situation has brought out into the light (yet again) the stark, ugly reality of the divide between the haves and the have-nots. We can spend billions of dollars on a wall between the US and Mexico but somehow we can’t figure out how to provide comprehensive health coverage for every citizen. I mean thank goodness for small favors; at least he’s actually registered at the VA at this point (unlike when he had a stroke in 2006, and was treated like a second-class citizen by the staff at Doctors Hospital [coincidentally, also the hospital where I was born], since he didn’t have insurance). He has Medicare Part Whatever - I can’t keep track of all the letters and what they mean. I worked on a program for it back when it first came out in 2005, and I remember thinking, holy shit, if I can’t make hide nor hair of this nonsense then how the hell is someone who’s elderly and unwell going to navigate this fucking labyrinth of bureaucracy? Oh but at least the web site had large type!

Anyway Medicare Part XYZobtwFU will pay for a nursing home - but only for 90 days. Someone explain that rationale to me! Who goes into a nursing home and then, after 90 days, is suddenly fit and well and ready to go golfing!? Or do they just expect you’ll die before the 90 days is up? If not, go ahead and start spending your retirement savings - oh wait, that’s assuming you have any retirement savings. There’s that nasty divide again.

And yet knowing all this, my mom still votes Republican. It baffles.

I don’t know. There’s more I want to say. I’m on an emotional rollercoaster. And there’s this side of me that’s infuriating even myself, where I start to feel selfish (that word again!) for even mentioning this to anyone, like they’re going to think I’m trying to say I’m the only person who’s ever dealt with a family crisis. Now realistically, who would think that? No one. But that’s my mind for you.

I guess one of the good things about going to Augusta this weekend is that I won’t have to see that stupid psychiatrist on Saturday. I really do not like her, but for now she’s the one prescribing my meds. I don’t feel that I’ve been benefiting from talk therapy lately, but that’s another story for another time.

And I have another post about my dad and such in the works which will come out eventually, but it’ll need to be password-protected. And who knows when I’ll get around to writing it.

Oh and also? Preemptively… please, no comments on this post telling me what I should do or who I should call or what I should look into. Unless you know something 100% definitive and can do the work for me? Well, I appreciate that you might mean well and want to help, but no thanks.

Yesterday I went to see a psychiatrist, recommended by the therapist (a licensed clinical social worker) I’ve been seeing. The last time I saw a psychiatrist was when I was in college, and he’s the one who originally prescribed Wellbutrin for me. I don’t remember who prescribed it for me when I lived in Texas. When I moved to Atlanta, my primary care doctor started prescribing it for me, and admonishing me to see a therapist, since I wasn’t going to one at the time. A couple years ago that doctor stopped working after she had a baby, and the doctor’s office assigned me to another primary care doctor for insurance purposes, but I’ve never actually met the guy. Nevertheless, the office keeps refilling my prescription every time I call for refills.

All of this is to say, I’ve been on Wellbutrin now for about 5-6 years, and it’s been working great the whole time. But I knew that sooner or later I would have to see a real live doctor for med maintenance, as it’s called.

And more importantly, for the past several months - okay, going on a year now - there have been times when I’ve felt as if I might be sliding into depression. I can spot the warning signs, and I want to do everything possible to make sure I don’t end up there again; it’s not fun (obvious statement of the year). After talking with my therapist though, we both think it’s more anxiety than depression.

Oh, I should back up: a few months ago I started seeing a therapist again. She’s up in Dunwoody, and it takes two hours out of a workday for me to go see her (her office hours are exactly the same as mine). The office doesn’t file insurance, which pisses me off, because I have to file it myself, and so far I haven’t gotten any refund checks (the first time I mailed in my claims, and later called to see if they’d been received, and was told they had “no record” of the claims… no surprise there). Anyway, I really like this therapist, and I’ve been seeing her every other week; but I don’t know how long I’ll keep it up, with the travel time and the insurance pain in the ass.

There are a few psychiatrists at the office too, and she recommended I see one for a medication evaluation. So that’s what I did yesterday. The doctor decided to keep my current dosage of Wellbutrin and also add a small dosage of Lexapro, which is anti-anxiety medication. I’ll be getting that prescription filled this week, and within a few weeks to a month I should start to see results… hopefully good ones. She said Lexapro can cause nausea; I hope I don’t have that problem.

And can I just say, I am really irritated with therapists’ offices (or any doctors’ offices, but I’ve never known any other than psychologist/psychiatrist offices that act this way) that don’t file insurance for you. My therapist said, “There are just too many different types of insurance.” Well excuse me, that’s why there’s an office staff! My therapist in Texas (whom I loved; seriously, when I moved back to Georgia I wished I could take her with me) worked at an office a lot like this one, and they filed insurance with no problem. I think it’s presumptuous and lazy for them to expect patients to do it. I don’t know if I’ll ever see the refund checks for the appointments I’ve paid for so far, especially the $300 appointment yesterday. It just pisses me off, because I’m paying for insurance but of course they give you the run-around. (Again, why can’t everywhere be nice and responsive like USAA? Sad that service like that is a minority…)

Anyway, that’s that. I know I got off on a tangent, so this is partially an insurance rant and partially an update on my mental health situation. I’m publishing it now… without proofreading!

Sassywho’s post about her two ectopic pregnancies - and how she was treated like day-old shit by the ER staff - has me feeling all shaken up. Not because I’m shocked at the cruelty and mistreatment she endured; but because I’m not shocked, since I know that this kind of thing is all too common, and if anything, it’s the rule rather than the exception.

And I’m angry. And I feel powerless. I hate that feeling, anger coupled with powerlessness. It’s one of the worst, and it usually sends me spiraling down one of those “what the fuck do we do and why are we here?” tunnels - and I don’t like when my train of thought heads in that direction. I don’t like the powerlessness, because it ultimately means the anger usually ends up getting turned inward and is damaging to me, so I usually have to find some other way to deal - such as distraction by focusing on good things. Some may call it sticking my head in the sand, but I call it fucking survival. What the fuck else am I going to do? Sit here and be miserable? Like it or not, I - one person - can’t change the sorry state of healthcare in this country. That doesn’t mean I’ll stop voting for the right people, and donating to the right organizations; it just means, simply, that I don’t have the magic wand I wish I had.

But, that last paragraph was a tangent. The other thing about Sassywho’s post is that it’s quite timely. Because today when we were at the hospital, I was feeling very nervous. Obviously, I was nervous simply because I wanted Rusty to be okay, and it’s hard not to be nervous when the love of your life is having surgery. But I was also nervous for another, more insidious reason: I don’t trust hospitals. I don’t trust the medical establishment in this country, in general.

I was pretty surprised at how friendly and helpful everyone we encountered was, for the most part. Then I was irritated because something that should be the expected default came as a surprise. And, when there was that one nurse in the recovery area who behaved as if we were inconveniencing her with our presence, and seemed to be trying to shoo us out of the place as quickly as possible even though Rusty was barely lucid and in quite a bit of pain - well, I thought, “Yeah, the truth comes out.” That’s how I expect it and remember it, and have experienced it. It goes without saying that the fact that I expect rudeness and dismissiveness is fucked up.

Then I started to wonder, too, if all the other staff members we dealt with - nurses, surgeon, anesthesiologist - would have been just as nice if Rusty weren’t insured. I tried to stop myself from having that thought, because I recognized how unfair it was. And I did get the feeling that many of the people we dealt with, especially the nurses, were genuinely nice, caring people. (They might not even know about patients’ insurance status or financial situation. I don’t know how that works.)

But my mind kept going back to how my dad was treated when he was in the hospital after his stroke last year: like a second class citizen, to put it bluntly. Uninsured and without a stable source of income, they treated him as an inconvenience and a liability. They were trying to get him out of there as soon as possible, and they barely made any effort to pretend otherwise. He stayed in the hospital for a way shorter period of time than he should have. Instead of physical therapy, they photocopied some pages of exercises intended for orthopedic patients and told my mom, “Have him do these.”

My mom has never liked to admit that we’re not the middle-class suburban folks I think she thinks we’re supposed to be. She does that extra-vengeful classism thing that I guess comes out of embarrassment, or guilt, or god knows what. When we were staying at the hospital with my dad, she recounted a conversation with the hospital social worker; she had made sure to stress that while he didn’t have insurance, it wasn’t because he was “lazy” or “a bum.” You know, like those people. The other people who don’t have insurance.

Eh, another tangent there. Point being… well, I don’t know what my point is, really. Just that I distrust the medical establishment in general. This is already long enough, so I won’t even get into the time I was hospitalized for depression in 2001 as a broke, just-married college student. I hope to [insert deity here] that I never have to go to the ER for something as serious as what Sassywho went through, where I literally might die because the people working there are “jaded” and “burnt out.” Excuse the fuck out of me for not giving a good goddamn.

I don’t want to end this on such a pissed off, powerless note, because like I said earlier, I don’t like that feeling, and I don’t want to be passing it along to y’all. So I’ll go stick my head in the sand now, and you do the same if you’re so inclined. Keep voting, writing letters, and donating whatever time or money you can; beyond that? Well, life’s too short to feel powerless all the time. So find the good where you can, and enjoy every nanosecond of it.

One of the “issues of the day,” so to speak, that makes me the most angry, sad, flustered, etc. all at once, is the healthcare issue. It is waaaay up there on the list. When I think or talk about it for too long (and a very short amount of time constitutes “too long” for me), I get so riled up, and just stay in a state of agitation until I manage to shake it somehow. I don’t know what to do with all that energy that the anger and sadness produces in me. I end up feeling so powerless - there’s nothing I personally can do, and I hate that.

I believe that a responsible government, first and foremost, takes care of its citizens. I believe that all U.S. citizens should have access to comprehensive medical care free of charge. I believe this to the core of my being and nothing will change my mind.

I get Molly Holzschlag’s RSS feed. Yes, Molly Holzschlag, the prominent web standards advocate. “What does this have to do with healthcare?” you ask. Well, today I read this in Molly’s feed:

I have no medical insurance and cannot find anyone to insure me. I am a U.S. citizen, so there is no health care for me whatsoever unless I become completely impoverished. But I’m in the middle class, unmarried, and have no access to regular medical care. This problem has gone on for years now, and I believe at the core of my soul that my challenge of this moment, on this day, has everything to do with my nation’s inability to care for its own.

I read that, and now I’m once again filled with that angry energy and nowehere to put it. I want to make it better for Molly, for my dad, and the millions of other Americans dealing with sources of stress that should not exist.

After my dad had his stroke, he refused to go to the hospital, because he knew it would be “too expensive.” For two days he refused, and in the meantime further endangered his own life (for example, he fell getting up out of a chair, as a result of impaired balance due to the stroke) and the lives of others (e.g., my mom’s mental health was absolutely shot; also, he was driving - thank god he didn’t get into a car accident, who knows who he might’ve killed). It took my mom calling me, nearly hysterical, begging me to try to “talk some sense into him” - which I tried to do, but when he spoke to me in response, I could barely make out any words because his speech had become so unintelligible - and an intervention of sorts, to finally get him to go. (The intervention was a friend of the family going over to my parents’ house the following morning to help my mom physically force my dad into the car if necessary, and drive them to the ER.) In the hospital, they treated him like a second-class citizen - which, being without insurance, I guess that’s what he was. These days, my mom’s mental health is slowly improving (I think) - at least, she’s not taking Valium every day anymore - but she has lost about 12 pounds and is getting dangerously thin. And of course the medical bills are sky high.

This should never be allowed to happen in the wealthiest nation in the world.

I’m finished with the Cipro and the orange pee medicine, but I don’t think they did much good. The back pain has returned (though it’s not as bad as before), and I’m still peeing all the time (not literally). So I guess a trip to the doctor is in order - and a fun game of, “To what extent will my insurance try to weasel out of covering this?”

I am being medicated for my mysterious illness. No, I didn’t go to the doctor - apparently my phone conversation with her nurse was good enough for her, because she called in two prescriptions to my pharmacy today. So now I’m taking Cipro, which apparently treats the more plebeian afflictions in addition to exciting ones like anthrax; and Phenazopyridine, which makes me piss Vol orange - I shit you not. I mean, the nurse had told me, “it’ll make your pee orange,” but I guess I wasn’t expecting to issue BRIGHT ORANGE KOOL-AID from my bladder. More than one person has suggested (challenged?) that I take a picture and post it, but I think that might be crossing a line.

Anyway. Obligatory college football reference: If I bleed red and black, what does it say about me that I also pee orange? Hmmm.

Addendum: Perhaps the most alarming thing about the Phenazopyridine is the part on the patient info sheet that says, “Staining of the contact lenses has been reported.” WTF? This can only suggest that (a) they expect that I’ll be pissing on my contacts; or (b) my EYES WILL TURN ORANGE. Since (a) will not be happening, I’ve gotta put it all on (b) - and that’s a disturbing prospect indeed.

First of all, apologies that my site was down for a few hours this afternoon. Apparently my host was having problems. So if you weren’t able to get your daily/semi-daily/hourly(?!) Being Amber Rhea fix, take it up with them, not me! </delusion type=”grandeur”>*

I concur with Tony Simon in hatred of reading about other people being sick - but that’s not going to stop me from subjecting you to it here, since this is my blog, ghatdammit. I think I must have either a UTI or some kind of kidney infection - that’s what my symptoms would suggest, anyway, according to a reputable health site with which I have no affiliation. I called my doctor this afternoon and spoke with her nurse; Doc was supposed to call me back, but she hasn’t yet. Hopefully she’ll call tomorrow morning and I can pop in for a prescription of antibiotics or something. Anyway, whatever it is I have, the point is that I’m feeling kind of crappy and I’ve become a Excedrin-poppping junky so as not to be in constant pain. Excedrin: it’s not just for headaches anymore!

* Ed. Note: Yes, I am aware that’s not proper HTML syntax. But it wouldn’t have been as funny to have a proper opening tag with the attribute and value on it. So suck it up, Captain Anal Retentive.

My back still hurts, as mentioned in the previous post. WTF? I hope there’s nothing seriously wrong with me. Well, my solution for now is to pop some more acetaminophen and spend the rest of the day lying on my ass. More blogging to come - this is pure filler material.

Well, according to my doctor, my total cholesterol level is 200 and my triglycerides are "a little on the high side". She said the cholesterol level was fine and that she wasn’t really worried about the triglycerides — but I’m worried. According to the Lipitor project that I spent weeks — nay, months — working on, "[o]ptimal is less than 200" when it comes to total cholesterol. She didn’t break it down into HDL and LDL, but maybe I’ll call her back and ask.

This doctor is the first general practicioner I’ve been to in years (I went last week). In fact, I can’t even remember the last time I had a physical prior to this. But, the combination of 1) having health insurance, and 2) working at a health-related company, has made me take a renewed interest in my health (as if I were neglecting it before — that’s not the case), and actually find a doctor, so that I have someone with whom to talk about sensitive issues such as those in prescription drug commercials that advise, "Talk to your doctor."

So, what does this say to me? It says that maybe I should head more in the direction of "mostly vegetarian, who eats chicken once in a while" rather than the "flexitarian [buzzword alert!] who eats Chick-Fil-A several times a week" that I seem to have become. It shouldn’t be that hard. I mean, I was a real vegetarian for over 4 years (probably more like 6 years, allowing time out for the mid-2000 poultry lovefest and subsequent 20-lb. weight gain). And now that Maximo’s [they’re called Murphy’s in Texas] has opened a block away from work, I’ve been eating a veggie pita for lunch most days of the week rather than Chick-Fil-A.

I know I shouldn’t worry… I mean, overall I’m in excellent health. It was just something totally unexpected to hear, you know? Anyway, I’ll quit blathering now. (And I’m still going to allow myself a couple of Krystal burgers when the mood strikes.)