Me too! I desperately need to move into an apartment.
But there are not any nearby options so I would have to move at least 45 minutes away to find something like that.
I promise you that it was dumb when I typed it, like most of what I post.
Yes, I was ranting at Discourse and other auto-correct systems that automatically turn a ' at the beginning of a word into an opening single quote rather than an apostrophe. It bothers me more when I see it on signs, just because I naïvely expect signmakers to care about such things.
Good thing we don’t have universal healthcare - imagine how long your wait would have been! /s
There’s a lot to love about universal health care, for certain, but I’ve heard a number of stories from my Canadian relatives suggesting that wait times there can be as bad as in the US or worse. Purely anecdotal, of course, but my cousin in Nova Scotia had to wait ten months to get surgery for a (non-life-threatening) digestive condition and (speaking of MRIs) my uncle in Toronto had to wait so long for one in Canada that he eventually chucked it and went to Buffalo instead. Now, these are folks who are generally quite pleased with their healthcare and universal health care in general, and I’m sure there are (many) counterexamples in their lives where they were seen right away, etc. But in these situations (and a couple of others) anyway universal health care has been no guarantee of immediate access to resources.
In Ontario (and I’m pretty sure everywhere else) there are maximum wait time targets for diagnostic imaging based on urgency. An MRI request rated as Priority 2 (the highest non-emergency priority) has a target wait time of no more than 4 days. A Priority 4 wait can be months. CT scans are similar. There are no wait times of note for simple thingx like ultrasounds.
My brother had to explain to a cousin why a good intentioned plan to send ham sandwiches (leftovers from a Thanksgiving meal) to a predominantly Jewish pre-school was actually a bad idea.
Can I anti-rant?
My Medicare Part D plan decided to no longer be offered in “my area.” Dunno what area is – the whole state? The county? My town? My specific address because they just hate me personally? Well, whatever, it meant I had to pick out a new plan and enroll in it by Dec. 7, or maybe by Dec 31, the mailings they’ve sent me are not consistent.
And I hate change, especially change I am forced into and that could have major financial repercussions and involve all sorts of variables I’m not really sure about. And Cigna has treated me fine for these past whatever years and I’d have been perfectly happy continuing.
So there’s an official Medicare website they kept directing me towards, which will help me with the choice. I balked for weeks, I just did not want to face the job.
But hey, it’s Dec. 3 and according to about half the mailings the deadline is less than a week away. So I manned up and clicked on it.
And it turned out to be perfectly easy and comprehensible and damn near painless!
I take eight prescription drugs daily. The thought of having to type in all their names, dosages, etc. was daunting. But no! They had retained the list of all seven drugs I was taking as of last year! All I had to do was ‘edit’ two of the ines where my dosage had changed. Took way less than a minute! And then there was the new drug. Type in the name, it said – I got as far as ‘glip’ when it autofilled apparently the only drug that starts that way, and gave me a drop down box to pick which of five dosages it comes in. Way, way less than a minute!
Then it had retained the drugstores I had entered back when, and asked it I wanted to add to that list – no.
Then it offered to list all the drug plans available to me in this area, and to sort them by various orders, like lowest to highest total drug costs, star ratings, alphabetical. So I scrolled the list, picked out one that was on the low cost side from a company I’ve heard of. A couple of minutes, maybe.
Then it told me which of the drug stores I’d entered where in the plan, and offered to show what my anticipated total annual cost would be for premiums + copays at each of them. Bing, bing, bing.
Then click here to enrol —>
And then I had to fill out the application, which was no more than Medicare number, name, address, and a few questions about how do you want to pay the premiums and what other insurance coverage do you have. And like 90% of the answers were prefilled for me, since I hadn’t moved or changed my name or whatever in the past year.
So this task I’d been dreading ending up taking just about fifteen minutes from start to end. (Well, sort of end, I have to wait for them to process and mail me a new card and no doubt a pile of paper.)
Anyway, I think it was the single pleasantest time I’ve ever had dealing with a website. And given that it was the Federal government and dealt with a shit-ton of variable factors… Way to go!! Great job, Mr/Ms web designer!!
Oh, to be sure. I was poking at the anti-UHC implication that there are no wait times in the US.
Shhh, it was coded by a Somali immigrant.
Father-in-law again brought his feral un-housetrained un-fleaprevented dog over for a stay of a few days, which then meant our otherwise well-trained dogs resorted to competitive pee marking in the house and are now covered with fleas. Again. Everytime this happens it takes a month to get our dogs behavior sorted and our house un-fleaed again.
And you said “Oh, sure, why not?” … 
If anything’s worth destroying a family relationship over, this is! I mean, urine and fleas?
Yeah. Key point here is he’s ‘in-law’, who is ridiculously coddled and covered for by the direct side of the family, so I’ve lost that specific battle. Subject for another rant someday.
Also, as I often point out (and did again just a few posts up) an important aspect of wait times is that it’s triaged according to urgency. Thus while some patients might wait months for an MRI as a Priority 4, Priority 2 has a target of no more than 4 days. There’s technically no “Priority 1”, it’s simply called “an emergency” and treated as such. Some time ago my son had an immediate CT scan when he had symptoms that could have been a post-surgery infection, which very fortunately turned out to be something else that was far more benign. Every once in a long while something falls through the cracks, but in general the triage system works well and helps to keep costs down.
Something to keep in mind when people complain about wait times.
Nothing helps working on a tight deadline like being constantly asked if it’s going to be done on time with extra reminders about how urgent it is! Look, if I have an issue, I’ll let you know! Thank you!
I have reached the Is of my A-Z list.
I don’t wanna
I find this mind-numbing
I’m doubtful this will contribute much
I’m halfway done, give or take
Update: After a month and a half wait, I finally got my CPAP. The lady told me I had moderate sleep apnea, which makes me hopeful I’m going to start feeling less exhausted soon. It looks pretty plug and play and it seemed comfortable enough in the store. I already have it set up to go through the app tutorial tonight before bed. Wish me luck. (Also: what’s with the water? Will have to look into that.)
In honor of my dead friend, who had a running joke about how much he hates poetry, I’m scouring the Internet for the worst grief poetry I can find, to be read at the Holiday party in his honor. Let me know if you have any suggestions. (There’s also been talk of streaking, but I’ll leave that to my friends. No thank you to winter nudity.)
You could do worse (better?) than “Ode to Stephen Dowling Bots, Dec’d” by the immortal (well, not so immortal) Emmeline Grangerford:
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45419/ode-to-stephen-dowling-bots-decd
The MRI revealed that not only did I break the bone in the elbow, but also tore a tendon. So I am scheduled for surgery on Friday, like the day after tomorrow. Yuck.
Not what I had in mind.
Follow up appointment scheduled with the referred-to doc…for 5 weeks out. ::Sigh::
That’s pretty good. Sorry to hear about the surgery. I hope it’s over soon and you recover quickly.
Thanks!