No Commercial Potential: Another such victory and I am undone.

Year to Date24 April 2007

If you know me, you probably know most-to-everything that follows. If you don’t know me, you probably don’t give a damn about most-to-everything that follows. Yet here I go, giving the general rundown to all comers of how my 2007 is working out. So strap on your time travel pants (or go do something more productive) and lets go back to that magical time…

December 19, 2006

Poor breath capacity, inexplicable stabbing pains about the right back and chestal area and general malaise prompt me to drag my ass in for medical attention. Lack of a detectable fever means I get a tentative diagnosis of costocondritis, perfectly inffectual sampler packs of Celebrex and a hearty “good luck with that”. It’s easy to make claims this far out, of course, but I knew what I had, and I knew this turn was going to make things worse. But there was little I could do about it as I had to fly to Colorado two days later for the annual Holiday Discharge of Familial Obligation.

Or I would have done, had it not been the Xmas Blizzard from Hell that shut down Denver’s “all-weather” airport for the better part of three days and pushed my travel back to Xmas night. By the time I actually arrive in my homeland, I feel like Satan’s toilet brush.

December 26, 2006

A fever of 103! Let’s all go to Urgent Care! After we have Chinese food! (This is true.)

After. A Physician’s Assistant (who seems to be about ten years younger than me and this kind of freaks me out) listens to my lungs, orders up some x-rays and comes the the very non-shocking conclusion that I have a whole right lung full of pneumonia. I get a shot of antibiotics, a $100 prescription and orders to follow up back in Chicago. The rest of the trip is spent feeling various flavors of hellish and living on green tea and ibuprofen.

January 3, 2007

Back in the care of Dr. Misdiagnosis. He sends me downtown for x-rays. And calls that evening to inform me that bad things have been discovered. In the form of fluid filling up the plural sac around my lung. It absolutely has to be dealt with medically, and no, it will not go away on its own. I can either do this at Northwestern for a very large amount of money, or I can go to John H. Stroger Jr Hospital of Cook County and submit myself to their Emergency Room.

January 5, 2007

[Description of County ER experience — which is nothing at all in any way like the TV show ER and results in a certain amount of upset and outfreakage on my part and no actual significant medical attention — deleted.]

Northwestern Memorial Hospital Emergency Room. Still not much like ER. But with 100% less outfreakage. General ER stuff happens involving insertion of needles and removal of fluids, etc. I am seen by approximately fourteen doctors and repeat my story up to this point to each of them. I am IV’ed, x-rayed (again) and admitted.

At approximately 4:30am two residents show up with a large needle (among other things). Said needle gets stuck into my back. Over the course of about twenty minutes I leak half a liter (!!) of brownish liquid into a plastic bag. And then someone comes in with a giant machine for another x-ray. Loves the radiation, me.

The next morning the attending physician manages to discuss my case with about eleven interns and arrange my discharge without ever making eye contact or addressing me directly.

So: Let’s fast forward a bit. A half-assed convalescence… An abortive attempt to return to Aikido... still more x-rays, frowny faces and a referral to a pulmonologist from Dr. Misdiagnosis… and also a CAT scan… and we discover that, well, this fluid hasn’t gone anywhere. In fact, it’s settled in and turned from fluid to muck. It absolutely has to be dealt with medically, and no, it will not go away on its own. But if I sold all my organs on the black market my uninsured ass still couldn’t afford to have the necessary procedure done at Northwestern. Which means I get to deal with County again.

But before I can even get anyone at County to even acknowledge my existence, much less my condition…

February 12, 2007

In an effort to be able to afford both the already accumulated as well as the anticipated medical bills I announce The Phineas Lung Reclamation Fund to sell pictures for lung money. This actually works far better than I expect. Lots of people (friends, strangers and otherwise all of whom now have free passes to Heaven) buy things and lots just donate money for nothing which I find especially weird. Lots of my pictures get distributed all over the place. No one is more amazed than me.

So here’s how it goes with County…

I have to get a couple NWM doctors to call the pulmonary clinic and badger them before they’ll even deal with my case. Then they give me an appointment a six weeks out. Recall that I have a condition that absolutely has to be dealt with medically, and no, it will not go away on its own and in fact may cause permanent damage if allowed to persist. So another doctor calls them, badgers, gets me in after only a couple weeks.

Get up at a quarter to six in the morning to take the Damen bus all the way down to County in time for my “appointment” at 8:30am which is actually just an appointment to show up and wait for two+ hours in the pulmonary clinic. And then to talk to a pulmonologist for ten minutes after she looks at my previous CAT scan and points out that I have a condition that absolutely has to be dealt with medically, and no, it will not go away on its own. So I have to come back in a week to the surgery clinic and talk to a surgeon and see what _he_wants to do.

A week later repeat above procedure. Talk to the cardio-thoracic surgeon who won’t do anything until he gets another CAT scan done since the one I’ve got is nearly a month (!!) old now.

Four days later repeat above procedure except this time wait in the radiology clinic and then get another CAT scan.

The following Monday, repeat the above procedure, talk to the surgeon again who informs you that your condition (which absolutely has to be dealt with medically, and no, it will not go away on its own) has more or less gone away on its own.

This is possibly the only time in history that bureaucratic inefficiency and the fuck-up-ed-ness of the American healthcare industry has actually saved someone — me — some thousands of dollars and three days in the hospital with a tube in my chest. Not that I’m complaining. Much.

So, medically speaking, that brings us pretty much up to date. I am still paying off various hospital bills, or attempting to arrange uninsured loser discounts for said bills. But with the Lung Fund effort, my kind of accidentally ending up with more-or-less legitimate full-time work I believe it will all be covered. And I didn’t even have to spend the money I’d saved up for taxes.

To illustrate the degree of economic turnaround I’ve experienced, just this Saturday I was able to adopt a new baby who will be a great help in providing material to be posting on this newly revived site.

So now I’ve got all that out and out of the way. I can get back to filling up this space with more current nonsense. If you actually read all of this, my apologies.

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