Celtic Crossroads

Hi Everyone:

Things have not been easy lately.  The pulse generator has been having problems over the last 3-4 months after a bout with a late influenza (the rebound kind, where you get it, it goes away and comes back worse for about 4-6 weeks).  Well, I got dizzy coming down the stairs and almsot fell, but caught myself.  At 54 yy, it could mean problems, but the main one was that the head pain came back to what it was before I got the pulse generator.  It felt worse because I was so used to have it decreased by 80-85%.  What a pain–literally and figuratively.  I went to the M.D. who put it in and we talked and he did an X-ray, but it looked as if it hadn’t moved at all.  The representative who supplied the pulse generator was there adn she reprogrammed it with 8 new ones, but they haven’t helped at all.  Now I’m wondering if maybe some of the electrodes didn’t fail.  Not sure what is going on, but have to drive to Seattle again to have them look at it again.  Not how I wanted to spend my weekend, but being in bed for weeks on end isn’t the way I want to spend my life either.  Hopefully they’ll fix whatever happened.

My hubby’s been watching over the animals, but things are strained here as well.  He’d prefer not to have them at all, so until this health issue is fixed, I’m selling off all my sheep adn keeping the alpacas so that they can keep the grass down in the front pasture.    Can’t let all 8 sheep and 4 alpacas out there at one time or they over graze it…not good for the pasture.  Have the ad in the local buy-sell paper so hopefully they’ll be gone soon.  Hay is not over $200/ton which is way too much to afford with finances the way they are at the moment.  Haven’t been  able to teach or to sell at the farmers’ market, so it’s a bit slow now.  Although I’ve been knitting and crocheting to try to keep from focusing on the pain…which sometimes works and sometimes doesn’t.  I just hate the thought of selling my animals though…I love them.

A year or so ago, I was seeing a doctor, but she lied to me.  If a doctor cannot be honest and tell you the truth, they have no right to be a doctor.  The Hippocratic Oath says first and foremost, do no harm.  And when she lied to me about something that she could have done easily, she did harm.  I won’t ever go back to that clinic again if I can help it because I don’t trust an organization who stand behind a doctor who’ll lie to her patients.  I checked with my pain doctor in Seattle about it, and he told me that they did not have to see a patient every month to write a pain medicine prescription, especially when the notes he sent her said that I was stable.  That was unethical for a doctor to tell me that she can’t prescribe pain meds every other month because it’s against the law–an outright lie. Then to have her boss come in and say the same thing was even worse.  After that, I started seeing another M.D. at a different clinic.  I like her so much better.  The M.D. I see now is fine with prescribing my meds…and with the law changing even more so that she only need to see me once every 3 months works out well.  So, the old clinic lost out on not just getting money from me and my insurance companies, my husband and his insurance company, as well as my husband’s folks.  Funny how that works…losing 4 people because of one doctor’s lies.  Of course, it doesn’t matter to them as they have more patients than they can see and they are on waiting lists.  Well, I’m sure they had the people to fill our 4 slots, but I wouldn’t recommend anyone go there.   I’m sure there are other doctors out there who lie to their patients and all I can say is if you catch them in a lie, go see someone else as quickly as you can.  It’s not worth your health to keep seeing someone who doesn’t care enough about you to tell the truth…they might lie to you about something even more important next time.

Another thing about health care is that there are so few M.D.s who are able to take care of the elderly or geriatric crowd.  Those in the baby boom generation are the ones who are going to suffer the most.  I’m 54 and am not quite there yet, but our folks are.  And there are so few M.D.s who are going into geriatric medicine at all, so those who are in geriatric medicine are so overwhelmed.  I’m kind of surprised since most of us in the baby boom generation have more expendable income that the M.D.s would love to get their hands on it with all the worn out joints, bad backs, and diseases…it would give them a good income for years to come.  Our Children are a much smaller generation and they take better care of themselves (or at least we, their parents, can hope that they do), so the income possibility there is much smaller.    I rather worry about that as I’ve already got head pain and I’m not even 65 yet, but at least the rest of me is healthy so far with low blood pressure, great pulse, low cholestrol, etc.

This is a less than positive note, but one that needs to be addressed as so few people talk about what will happen when they get to be 65 or older.  We’re at the beginning of a major group of elderly people.  The facilities to care for them and the Doctors to care for them are less than adequate.  What are we going to do when we become one of those elderly people?  Scares me to think about it.

The good thing is if they can fix the pulse generator again, then I’ll be in better shape to have my positive attitude back again.  I’ll be able to sell at the farmers market and teach again which uplifts my spirits immensely.  Keep your fingers crossed.