Medicine is Borke

Dear blog,

I have some updates, but you get the griping with them. Gripe:

So here's how medical doctors do most things, it seems to me. Well, perhaps we'll do the "not most" or "some things" part because that's the cool part. Not most of the time, they remove things from you what ought not be there and cure you. Yay medical doctors. Most of the time, they recognize that something ought not be there and prescribe a treatment. Exit medical doctor, enter nurse, nurses, pharmacist or combination thereof.

Logical conclusion: You see a doctor anywhere, and get treated anywhere. Right? Wrong. The hospital won't treat you until you see THEIR doctor.

"Oh, when is YOUR doctor available to prescribe the same textbook treatment as MY doctor?"

Answer: a month an a half. I'm shocked, and that does not happen often. Well, say I, I have a fast moving cancer. None of that non-Hodgkins watchful waiting, prostate cancer what takes more than 10 years to kill you. Nay, I got happening, shaking up the dance floor Hodgkin's Lymphoma. Now when is YOUR doctor available?

A month and a week. They'll pull some strings to knock off a week. The actual update without gripe (maybe). I got an appointment for Monday (that I said last blues time, last blues hour), with an oncologist at Holzer. Holzer does not treat. Holzer's oncologist's patients get treated in Lancaster and Gallipolis. My home is roughly equidistant from each, 100 kilometers approximately. I would like to get treatment in Athens, at O'bleness Hospital (a mere 4.5 miles from my abode (a distance I hope to be able to bike even while being treated)), but they, as I griped, will not give me poison until their doctor sees fit that they do.

The plan: I will see the oncologist in Holzer on Monday. He will still be able to get the ball rolling on getting me staged, which since it is a brief process, I will be willing to go to Gallipolis to do it (I've been to Lancaster three times to try to get biopsies of my lymph nodes with no success before skipping one more out to Columbus. They say I'm young and should see the world. Hence, Gallipolis for the staging). I will see the Fancy Shmancy O'bleness oncologist three weeks later and bring diagnosis, staging and prescribed treatment from the Holzer oncologist and try to get him to say "Yea" so that I can be treated at O'bleness (the close one).

Constituent to the plan: (Does constituent mean what I think it means?...yes. Moving on.) I have scheduled an appointment to have my constituent part of any potential offspring analyzed up in Cleveland for the week after finals when I will be free to go up there. Cleveland clinic is the closest cryo facility to me, and the folks live there 'bouts and so on. Since Hodgkin's is a sterilizing disease, I need to get it analysed before paying my mother's hard earned dollars freezing it. No point freezing empty samples. Yeah?

Nigh identical constituent to the plan. I have made sure that Lakewood Hospital (near Cleveland) is on my insurance's preferred provider list so that I do some of the staging stuff up there. I know hospitals will take referred CT scans without pulling the "our doc first" line from experience. Hopefully I can get blood work done down in Athens or up in Lakewood and not have to make any trips to Gallipolis at all. But I've never been there. See the world, you know?

I don't know. I guess I'll find out.
-Ian Hogan.