I learn new things on Incels.co every day. Today I learned that only Chad babies are breastfed.
Uh, what?
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Adding to LollyPop’s advice:
If you are offered an appointment for six months from now, take it AND ask if you can go on the cancellation waitlist. You can always cancel, but if you haven’t made any progress, you can’t retroactively make an appointment.
If there is a number, CALL. People suck at prioritizing emails or internet submittals. It’s a lot harder to ignore a polite and worried person. Try to be polite and concerned.
Don’t be angry with them. It’s okay to express frustration and fear with the situation, but do not take it out on the person on the other end of the line. Doing so will not help. You want to develop empathy and rapport not “I just got yelled at by a paranoid arse who is now at the bottom of the stack because can you believe this person?”
LollyPop’s approach is good. Emphasize the “I am unable to treat this effectively with over the counter medications, and I am concerned about possible underlying conditions.”
Don’t drop a ton of detail about symptoms, but if they are increasing in severity, say that “it is getting worse” so they know to flag a little more urgency.
Stuff is heavily booked right now, because folks who could delay because Covid are now no longer able to delay and are in rougher shape for it.
It’s tough to be patient when you are hurting and scared. It’s okay to let them know that you are scared, because you have been waiting a long time. Ask for estimates of how long wait times are.
Accept whatever you can get, because it’s easier to get an earlier appointment ONCE YOU ARE IN THE SYSTEM.
For example, I was going to have to wait 3 months for a cardiologist. I took it, and managed to get in in a month. I was a terrified and fatigued wreck for that month, but…
There’s no guarantee that that’s how it will go for you, but holding out for something sooner definitely doesn’t help.
Good luck.
OT
My husband got his first vaccine for covid yesterday! He’s well on his way to being able to come home to see me finally. It’s really good news for me since there is a chance the vaccine won’t be effective on me because I don’t have a spleen. I am so excited to finally see him and have him in my arms again. It’s been well over a year now. At this rate our honeymoon phase is going to last like 3 years because we haven’t been able to see each other.
@Elaine
It’s great to hear that your husband is coming home soon.
@Naglfar
Yes, I am so excited. It will probably just be for leave. We have to work out the details. He’s done being active duty within a year so We’ll have to work out the plans around that, but for us it feels like a big part of this nightmare is slowly coming to an end.
I just want to point out that women generally don’t breastfeed babies that aren’t hot.
They warm them up, maybe take them to the ER. You don’t fuck around with a hypothermic baby!
Hola again amigos! From we all here on the west side of Chi 🙂
We’re still here and have been reading along, have just been busy.
Presently having a few beers.
@ Surplus,
Old friend. We hope you will feel better soon! 🙂
We have some ideas for you, mulling it all over, we think this one is something you need to consider right away –
Hiatal hernia.
No med people here. Friendo just remembered this from a guy she used to work with.
He had it.
Not to scare you. But if it would be this or something sim – it needs to be addressed ASAP.
You could maybe mention this and get ‘bumped up the line’ also.
And no trickery, you might have a serious problem.
If it is this, or sim – you will need surgery.
But – it’s pretty routine and an easy fix.
Look into this.
Really not trying to scare you. Just something to keep in mind, look into, a possibility to call to a doc’s attention, might even wind up to be the answer to various problems.
Something to look into, anyway.
Feel better soon! 🙂
Okay, I must admit I find newborn babies funny-looking. Not ugly really, just sort of…odd. And even when they start looking more human-like, I don’t think mothers are getting out a Cuteness Ranking Scale and rating them. Incel projection again.
@Elaine the Witch – Yay! I’m glad you can see him again soon.
@Z&T – Hello! Haven’t seen you here in a while. Glad to hear things are going OK.
@LollyPop:
There seems to be a peculiar fixation here on phone calls as some sort of magic elixir. Unfortunately, there are a number of problems with such an approach. I don’t know, for starters, who to call; and if I did, I still don’t know their number. Then there’s the poor ergonomics of phone calls, which are really only suitable for short and routine-ish interactions. One can’t share links or alphanumeric data, without excessively laborious spelling-out and repetition when the other side inevitably makes mistakes copying things down; they’re not asynchronous, so you’re stuck unable to do much of anything else while you wait on hold and things like that; your left hand is tied up for the duration, which further obstructs doing anything else during pauses or interruptions, and can even get tiring given enough time. The infrastructure is of dubious reliability, and if the call gets cut off by some glitch there’s typically some labyrinthine menu to navigate to get back to where you were, after which you typically have a different person answer so you have to start over from scratch since they won’t remember anything you told someone else entirely. Which means if the call gets cut off you’re forced to start over from scratch with no way to make enduring progress, and the whole thing becomes futile. And said labyrinthine menus require waiting while slow spoken language conveys the options until, at the very least, it gets to the one you want, repeatedly.
A web site is far more ergonomic. So is physically going somewhere and talking to a live person face to face. Even if the latter sometimes involves some waiting, you can bring a mobile device and multitask during that waiting. The web also has a huge advantage in searchability, though meatspace doesn’t, especially for people who don’t own cars.
First of all, they might not be actively discriminating but the “system” you describe (and I use that term loosely) is immensely susceptible to the effects of implicit bias, unlike, say, a take-a-number system where a computer spits out the next number after a while.
Second, what you’re describing sounds rather labor-intensive for something that I’m supposed to have automatically, by birthright, as a citizen here …
@Surplus
@contrapangloss explained the benefit of making a phone call, and the link I sent you had relevant numbers. If these don’t apply to your area, you can look it up yourself. It may not be your preferred system or as efficient as it could be, but it is how things work.
Your long waiting time will be due to the fact you are not an urgent medical priority. Unfortunately bumping yourself up the queue will only happen if you are proactive and make yourself known to them. This is why phone calls are so helpful.
I’ll stop now as I imagine you will not want to take this advice, but that is up to you.
Well, I’ve now had another supply run, and ran into another problem beyond being expected to phone numbers I don’t even know, somehow, and then “advocate for myself” without the result being people recategorizing me from “invisible and easy to ignore” to “nuisance to get rid of somehow”.
It seems I can’t have a conversation with a pharmacist about any of this either, even though I do have the opportunity to meet one face-to-face.
When I was in there earlier today there was no seating of any kind in the pharmacy area, which I don’t recall being the case previously. Ergo, there’s no way to have any kind of conversation of any duration or depth, as opposed to short transactional exchanges, since I no longer have the stamina to spend long periods of time standing (somehow, it’s much worse for me than walking).
So every avenue to deal with this seems to have been blocked, systematically, and most of them with obstacles that seem to be specifically tailored to me. (Lots of people wouldn’t have a problem with standing for half an hour to talk to someone, for example, and lots of people seem to have no trouble dealing with people over the phone either.) Does anyone have any explanation for this pattern of obstacles?
And regarding the stamina thing, I got to thinking about how those long walks into town used to bring me joy. The mild, but sustained, exercise felt good and I got some think-time.
I want to know who took that away from me, and how to hold them accountable for their horrific act of larceny.
I know someone did. This can’t just be simple aging. If everyone my age was as worn out after a two-hour grocery trip as I was today, there’s no way anyone could sustain a full time job once they got this old. The retirement age would be 40, not 65. Since that’s not what we observe, the hypothesis must be false and I’m not just growing old. Someone did something to me. I demand to know what. And how, if possible, to undo it. And how to track down the person responsible and have them charged with, at a minimum, assault.
@Surplus
No one did anything to you. For one, people age differently. For two, you’ve mentioned having certain medical conditions, so that could definitely have an impact. That seems far more likely than that someone is secretly injuring you.
Aging is gradual. Whatever this is, it’s step-function. One drop a few years ago, and a second early in 2020.
It might not be deliberately targeted. Perhaps some sort of environmental toxin exposure.
On the other hand, the fact that I don’t have a doctor I can bring these things to was deliberate. Someone made the decision to remove me as a patient from my doctor’s practice back in the summer of ’19. The failure of HealthCareConnect has me wondering if whoever was responsible also had me “blackballed”, or something of the sort. I did not do anything wrong to warrant such treatment, so this was an unprovoked and proactive attack upon me by whomever was responsible, and not a retaliation or a legitimate punishment for some action of mine.
Given what seems to be an accelerating decline in my health since then, it’s quite possible that that person is my murderer and I just haven’t quite gotten the message yet. Well, voluntary manslaughterer, unless they knew that my health would deteriorate in advance of doing what they did.
And given that there is demonstrably someone out there who is, at the very least, willing to be very cavalier about my physical well-being while using very cowardly methods to attack me for I-don’t-know-what-reason, it’s not beyond the pale that they’ve done far more than that, possibly up to and including poisoning me.
At a minimum, there is a human being out there who is at least partially responsible for my present health circumstances. I think they are owed at least a few sleepless nights for what they did, if not legal sanctions of some sort. Instead, there doesn’t even seem to be any mechanism of accountability at all for such decisions. Certainly none were ever suggested to me, at the time. As far as I know, some desk pilot somewhere who isn’t even publicly named, let alone elected or subjected to review by some elected body, has the authority to just scratch a name off a list and bam, no more non-emergency healthcare for you! Especially true if they have the power to shitlist their target with HealthCareConnect on top of it. At a bare minimum they have the ability to interfere with someone’s health care in a way that is difficult for the victim to undo, takes years to undo if it can be undone, and all without any apparent mechanism of public accountability or even just direct accountability to the people whom their decisions affect.
That seems wrong to me.
Surplus, I’m probably responding more than I ought because I recognize a lot of what you’re going through as things I have gone through, and I am extremely frustrated at you FOR you, in much the same way that I’d like to go back in time and smack past contrapangloss on the back of the head for not dealing with my own problems earlier.
It is HARD to advocate for yourself and get the care you need. It is ESPECIALLY hard when you are chronically fatigued. But, even though it’s not fair that it is so hard…
There comes a point where you’ve just got to do it. Even if it’s hard. Even if it’s scary.
It is not going to be easy. It’s going to be hard.
Go online. Google clinics near you. Call the first one on the list, even if it is not a walk in clinic. Tell them you need help finding where you CAN go. If they can’t give you an answer, call the next one. And the next one.
I HATE cold calling businesses. I damn near cried my eyes out. Every setback felt like the world was ending. It’s probably going to feel that way.
The first clinic that talks to you, or doctor that you eventually get in to see, might blow you off.
Try again.
Try as many times as you need to, until finally things start going the right direction.
It isn’t fair. It isn’t easy. It might even push you deeper in the financial hole.
But, my dude, the alternative that you’ve got is a sucky quality of life and possibly shortening your lifespan significantly.
I was fatigued for months, before I finally admitted I had a problem. It took months to finally get the drug K needed to not be fatigued. I literally cried tears of joy on the first dog-walk I went for where I could jog and skip a bit and bounce to music instead of dragging my carcass around long enough to keep my dog sane.
I could do laundry AND dishes, and read an entire book in bed without falling asleep, and take a nap that was actually 30 minutes instead of losing an entire evening if I sat down.
I’m not going to lie. It is not easy. It is INCREDIBLY HARD, and it’s even harder to recognize that every stumbling block is a stumbling block, and not an impossible mountain.
But dude, it isn’t a conspiracy. It’s life, and this is one of those things that you’ve got to do. Even if it is hard and feels impossible.
Get yourself help. Even if you have to cold call every clinic in 100 miles, twice.
It’s a sucky process, and it’s gonna suck. But you can do this. ‘Cause you’re gonna have to.
@surplus
in the last 6 months I have lost over 20 pounds without noticing it. I was not trying to lose weight. I did not change my diet or increase my exercise. I got stressed during lock down and lost interest in a lot of food, but still ate junk food. My mind was on so much other things that I didn’t even notice it. Even when my skinny jeans are no longer skinny, all my bras are bigger then what they were, and my favorite pair of pants I can’t wear without a belt, I still didn’t notice it at all. I had pushed it out of mind. I didn’t notice how much weight I lost until last night when my husband mentioned that my boobs were noticeably smaller when he saw me on a call completely naked. He had to bring up nudes from over 6 months ago to show me how much weight I’ve lost. When I weighed myself for the first time in months, I was shocked to find that even with clothes on, I was barely getting to 100 pounds. My point is, is that your ageing, you are stress from the pandemic, you body changed on you without you noticing. That’s all it is. No one has done anything to you and you will probably feel better once things are under control and you are no longer living under the stress of a global pandemic.
Adding: If your experience winds up being anything like mine, there’s a chance you’ll interact with some sucky doctors.
I had one that fixated on my cervix for some reason, when fatigue and palpitations were the problem.
Another looked at me and said “lifestyle changes” because I’m fat and thought I was either lying about my activity levels or the fatigue, because I was still walking 5-6 miles a day because that’s what you do when you live in an apartment and own a husky.
That is not the full list.
It sucked.
Hopefully your case won’t suck as much.
But as much as it sucked, it was necessary.
Do it for future you. Don’t let the suck stop you. I’m sorry, it sucks.
On that note, I’ve just blurted more stuff about me than I usually do online.
It was a little cathartic, but I’m done with this particular topic.
Surplus, I really, really hope you figure it out. I hope one of the clinics, nurse hotlines, whatever else you call will do the right thing for you and give you the right numbers/addresses.
And last thing… non-emergency stuff of sufficient duration can become emergency stuff.
It might get to a point where the best move is going to the ER and putting up with a tired doc’s judgmental “wtf are you even doing here” if only to be able to say to a clinic “I was seen at the ER for this, and told to follow up with a gp. Can I do the follow up here?”
You might not be at that point yet, and it’s a expensive point to get to, but it is a valid option if nothing else works.
Okay, now I’m done. I really hope you get the help you need. I really, really do.
@Elaine the Witch – I had a similar thing when I was doing my MA and under a lot of stress. I didn’t have much appetite (also a side effect of a medication) except for sugary things. I lost 10 pounds and had to have about 4 fillings on my teeth. Not fun. 🙁
@Surplus – I don’t know what it’s like to have chronic pain, but I also struggle with catastrophic thinking when I’m anxious. Seconding what contrapangloss said, it is hard to try and get help and the medical system does present invisible hurdles, but getting better medication and/or a more accurate diagnosis might make some of the fatigue and pain problems easier.
I know that might not be your style of communication to update us on how things are going all the time, and that’s fine, but I do encourage you to persist in calling and getting your medical needs met. You’re worth it.
@Epitome
It’s the brain going “sugar taste goods and makes the happy chemical, eat the sugar cause your to sad” and yeah, I had to get a filling as well, for the first time in years that happened. Promised myself I would cut back.