Wednesday, November 25, 2015

They Didn't Mind The Quack Quack Quack

Kaiser Permanente is a highly regarded health maintenance organization, and I like them well enough. Certainly I do not count myself among all those whiners you hear complaining about how they took off the wrong leg and stuff, like they're so perfect. I mean, they can do that only once at most, and then it's problem solved.

They've never offered to take anything off of me. I had a fatty deposit on my eyeball once that they figured could stay put. Got something they call fibroid tumors growing inside me and something else hanging out of my urethra like a damn pee deflector, and their surgeons won't get out of bed for any of those, either. They won't even slice off the mole where my eyebrow used to be. Sucker is big enough to throw shade but the only C-word they keep using is "cosmetic." During my colonoscopy, everything looked so good that they not only didn't nip anything out, but they didn't even need to clean the itty bitty camera afterwards. All they ever do when I point out potentially fatal conditions is offer to keep an eye on things.

That's the real problem with Kaiser. They never find anything wrong with me. I've explained to anyone who still listens that there's something wrong with my heart. It skips and flutters and doesn't kick in on a hike until I've gone a quarter mile or so, when it finally says oh fine and starts working again, and sure, then it gets me up a mountain and back, but you can't tell me people don't die in the first quarter mile. They do.

The doctors humor me. They've stuck electrodes on me and put me on a treadmill and hooked me up to machines and did a lung function test and most anything I've asked them to do, and everything always comes out just fine. They're quacks.

Take the other day. My crustacean tubes have been clogged up since I got the flu in February, so I consulted the Ear Nose and Throat contingency. They gave me a hearing test. They stuck doo-dads in my ears and disappeared into a different room and had me push a button when I heard things. Well, evidently, they haven't seen such a good hearing test on an old lady in ages. They couldn't stop gushing about it. Evidently, I could track whales from fifty miles inland. But heck. They stuck the sounds right in my ears. I'd like to see them try it from a few yards away, behind the crustacean tubes' backs.

That's what the nurse-lady did when I was taking my physical exam for postal work back in the '70s. She got at one end of the hall and asked me to repeat what she said, getting softer all the time. "Pancake," she said. "Pancake," I said back. "What?" she said.

That's how you conduct a hearing test. Well, it was silly anyway. Letter carriers never listen to anyone. They had us lift a seventy-pound sack, which was at least germane to the job. For the rest, they could have just dispensed with the physical and issued us bullet-proof vests, and we'd have been fine for anything that was likely to come up in the station.

So the ENT doctor came in and said more nice things about my hearing test and looked in my throat, where he claims he saw my crustacean tubes winking at him and looking tip-top, and then he looked in my ears and told me, breathlessly, that I had beautiful ear drums, and wrote me a prescription for Flonase just for the hell of it and called it a day. They're all about the flattery, Kaiser. Apparently I am a pink paragon of perfection.

Basically, they don't think I'm ever going to die of anything, and that's just medically incompetent. They have no credibility. I'm not buying any of it until someone peers down my throat and up my butt and between my toes and tells me it looks like I have a touch of being about to be hit by a bus.

And they're going to want to keep an eye on that.

32 comments:

  1. Not having Kaiser Permanente as an insurance option here, I had never heard of them. My first thought was that you were going to riff on a South American dictator.

    The way to be certain that your doctor is not a quack: when examining your crustacean tubes, did he use a fish fork? Since your crustacean tubes were in fine shape, he undoubtedly didn't need to use any melted butter or lemon juice on them.

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    1. South American Dictator! I will cherish that always, or at least when I'm in the waiting room for my mammogram! Fish fork. Possibly. My ears don't have eyes.

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  2. My doctor wanted to look in my ears so I asked if I could look in hers. It was cool! Looked like a little nativity scene in there! I didn't ask to reciprocate for the colonoscopy, though.

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    1. It probably looks like something out of The Lord Of The Rings.

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  3. It costs money if they find stuff!

    I had a similar hearing test to work on the Stock Exchange. Doctor held a watch to my ear and asked if I could hear it tick. I said no, he said that's because it's broken but you heard me ask the question, your fine.

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    1. That's a good doctor. I'll bet he gets half the people to say they heard it tick, and they don't get to work on the Stock Exchange. Or they go right to the top...

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  4. I never had you pegged for someone who worried about her health, Murr. Or perhaps you are just proactive? That's what I call it, too. This all sounds way too familiar to me. Heh. Oh, wait, does that mean there's also a bus somewhere waiting for me?

    And I thought Kaiser Permanente was a cleaning company at first! You did say "maintenance", after all (and I'm from above the border).

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    1. You people above the border have NO idea how to run a health program, obviously. You get what you pay for, and we pay A BUNCH.

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  5. I had a heart thing done once, and the doctor showed me the readout showing everything was fine. It looked something like a musical score. I showed him where the issues were, and he got kinda excited. He'd never seen PVC before. I was so glad to have the opportunity to teach him. WTF???!!!
    So, you know, maybe there IS something wrong with you, if that makes you feel any better.

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    1. Yes, it does. Wait. What? You have polyvinyl chloride?

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  6. I think I prefer them to my previous doctor who was very, very good at finding something which hinted there might be a problem. And organising a flood of expensive tests to discount her theories.
    And boring the doctor is always a winner.

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    1. I'm, let's say, proactive, but actually I'm fine with going in to the doctor and having her say there's nothing wrong with me. But if I HADN'T gone in...serious trouble.

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  7. Sounds like you are healthy, and so is your sense of humor. I hope things stay that way for a long time!

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  8. I had an audio test a couple of years ago.The nurse showed me into a small room, told me to put on the headphones and press a "left" or "right" button according to what I heard.
    She didn't tell me I had to go back to the waiting room after that. Eventually, someone came looking for me...

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    1. OMG. That would be me. They never tell you absolutely everything you need to know. They give you those gowns and forget to mention if they open to the front or the back, and it's not always obvious. Or the same. And there you are, sitting on the little cot thinking "I've got this backwards."

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  9. Don't worry about colonoscopy probes. They reel them up and hose them down back in the alley every morning. Cosmetic surgery at Kaiser is simpler. It is done by the old grizzled guy in the same alley heating a Bowie knife over a campfire. Ask for Jasper --he takes out bullets too.

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    1. I never worry about them. I only get one every ten years and I put my name on the probe with a Sharpie so they won't use it on anyone else.

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  10. You've got crustacean tubes? Wow. The rest of us have to make do with eustachian tubes.
    Still, it's nice to know that you're so healthy.
    If they could predict cases of about to be hit by a bus, a lot of insurance companies would have to fold up and go away.
    Pootie is a cute doctor.

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  11. Oh, I hate Kaiser as if I had not changed insurance I would be dead. They let me bleed for a year, more happened, but the ending is I had no red blood cell count and the new doctor said he was amazed I was alive. When he tried tog et the medical records of the "care" I'd had for a year with Kaiser, they had "lost" my records. Lawyers said without that I would have difficulty with suing. I am lucky to be alive today! I also know a friend whose wife died 6 days after giving birth via Cesarean, and Kaiser was found at fault and had to pay out a few million dollars.
    My brother had a heart test done where they put something in to look at it and the doctor lost it so had to have emergency surgery! Another friends 1 year old son had a dark area in the white of his eye and the doctors said it was probably nothing. A year later it turned out to be cancer in his eyeball and he had to have it removed at 2 yrs old. They also won a lawsuit. I know other stories...shocking. I would not have them even if it was free.

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    1. See? I told you people have stories. They've been taking good care of me, I think. I think. We'll see.

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  12. I had made one month's insurance payment to Kaiser when I had a baby 20 days later (completely covered) and then my cancerous thyroid a few days after that (completely covered). Don't know if they do co-pays now since we don't have Kaiser where I am, but back when I had it, everything was 100% covered. I sure got more than my money's worth that first month, and then LOTS of follow ups after that. Had I had any other kind of insurance, we couldn't have afforded all the care I got. So, for me, Kaiser was truly a life-saver.

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    1. We have copays but they're not too stiff. You certainly did get your money's worth out of your medical insurance! Which, usually, isn't something you really WANT to do...

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  13. Replies
    1. Most people pray for world peace, but we're all individuals.

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  14. I had an appendectomy at Kaiser in Portland, circa 1980. My main concern with the op was the anesthesia, it's where things can go awry with minor ops like that. I talked to the anesthesiologist, he seemed fine. On the table, some very old woman was messing about at my head with the mask and IV's....I asked her who she was. "Oh, I'm the nurse anesthesist, deary, the doctor had to go on another case." I was going under as she was saying this, it was my last conscious words: "Just do a good job, ok?"

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    1. I think you're usually in good hands when someone calls you "dearie" but I could very well be mistaken about that.

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  15. Happy Thanksgiving, Murr! Keep lambasting those turkeys and knock the stuffing out of them.

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    1. It's getting pretty violent in the kitchen this year.

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