Doctor, Doctor, Give Me the News…

Yesterday I went in for my physical… this is the first one since retirement and my doctor of over 30 years is retiring… So I met instead with a very nice nurse practitioner to go over my test results and discovered a few things. A new person means a new set of eyes… and a belief that the information you are being given is to new to you… Therefore is a teachable moment. What I think I learned was pretty simple although I might be exaggerating it. 😉

• Anything I currently enjoy eating will kill me- so I should stop eating.
• I need to also stop drinking anything except water, unless that water also contains fiber.
• If I do not exercise every day I will die.
• If I die I can stop taking the majority of the medications I am currently on.

Pretty much it looks like I’m as good as dead, and I have about seven pages of scientific reasoning explaining it all. 🙄 Included in those seven pages are detailed descriptions of what I should be doing (see list above for abbreviated version) Now to see how insurance reacts to this… I’m guessing any treatment that might help won’t be covered. “That class of medication is only for the wealthy, not retired teachers.” Maybe if health insurance also had to pay for funerals it would be different.🤔

I also learned that even when you are asked to fill out page after page of family history… like when you give students a reading assignment, Nobody seems to read it and they ask you questions that you already answered… or had to call some relative to answer- “Was the mole Aunt Marge had on her left hand cancerous?” For the record- I filled out the survey the office sent me, not the one the third party sent me from the hospital that required me to sign a release… Maybe I should have done that, but I had just filled out the one so why do it twice? Isn’t that what computers and AI are for?

I do appreciate the work people in the medical field do to try to keep stupid people like me healthy and alive. I just found it funny they are required now to ask questions about depression BEFORE they go over your test results… I wonder what would happen if they asked them AFTERWARDS. Stay tuned… I’m sure with the way health insurance works in the Untied States things will only get worse… politics are way more important than a healthy or educated populace. You know, we wouldn’t want THOSE people to get free healthcare even though that also means you would too. 🙄