In Which I Visit Pre-Reformation Doctors

So, a few weird things happened Friday (you know, back when we had the old, antiquated pre-reform health care) during the Day of the Doctors.

First off, I saw the retina doctor for my clinical trial eye-checkup.

“Have you had any eye disturbances?” he asked.

If he had asked me 24 hours before, I could have said no. But at lunch Thursday I sat facing the window and noticed there was an arc of prisms on the top right half of my right eye. A little like when you look through beveled glass, edges don’t line up. So there was a jagged arc of color. For 20 minutes. Freaky. A friend said it might be cataracts.

I answered, “There was an arc of prisms in my ey -“

“Migraine.”

“Oh no, my head never hurt. It was -“

“You can have just an ocular migraine. They always usually look like that, a jagged arc.”

Now, look here, I thought, we should just nip this in the bud, because we can’t be having migraines, ocular or otherwise.(To be more exact, I articulated my denial in my inner monologue as: fuck you, fuck you, fuck any fucking migraine, fuck you and your migraine fucking father.) So I shuttled that right into the Denial Lobe.

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Then, while I waited for doctor number three (neurologist) I thumbed through his book on headaches, where on a random page was Figure One: Migraine Images. Look! Jagged arcs on the upper right of the visual field. Fucking doctor leaving out a fucking book full of fucking lies. You won’t see that now that healthcare has passed.

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Then the neurologist checked my spasticity and asked, “Have you been feeling clumsiness in your right leg?”

“No.”

Then he wrote down “RL: spastic!” Fucker! Pre-reformation fucker! Thank God they passed health care so I don’t have to put up with any more of this.

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He also made the mistake of handing me my checklist on which he had written even more lies, like “brainstem involvement” and “dysphagia” (inability to sit at your desk and swallow you own spit without having it trickle into your lungs and make your legs kick out from under you and alarm your cubemates for three days in a row).

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So earlier tonight I was thinking about this migraine lie and this brainstem lie and this dysphagia lie, and Patient’s Rights and my rights to not have doctors lie about me, and I decided if President Obama did actually sign the bill into law I could stand up to these doctors, and I could go to my non-clinical trial neurologist and say, “So, I have this vision disturbance that happened once and this little choking thing that happened three times, and maybe you and I can work on nipping these things in the bud.”

And then because the bill will have been signed and my doctor is no longer a slave to these oppressive malpractice rules he can say, “Oh, let’s not even worry about those things; I’m sure they will never happen again.” He will not be a fucker because we have a new health-care paradigm.

Because healthcare that tosses out words like “dysphagia” and “migraine” and “Tourettes” without any consequence is not my idea of quality healthcare.