Miss Susie called the Doctor...the doctor called the nurse...

This children's verse actually is a great outlet for my frustration with the medical profession in this country:

Miss Susie had a baby, she named him Tiny Tim.
She put him in the bathtub to see if he could swim.
He drank up all the water, he ate all the soap, he tried to eat the bathtub but it wouldn't go down his throat.
Miss Susie called the doctor, the doctor called the nurse, the nurse called the lady with the alligator purse.
In walked the doctor, in walked the nurse, in walked the lady with the alligator purse.
Mumps! said the doctor, Measles! said the nurse, Nothing! said the lady with the alligator purse.
Out walked the doctor, Out walked the nurse, Out walked the lady with the alligator purse.

Last week I called my dermatologist, as I had a boil under my arm that was getting inflamed. I started myself on an antibiotic that had been previously prescribed for this type of thing. After a good conversation with the nurse, I asked some more questions, and the nurse said, we'll call back tomorrow with the answers. Well, she called back to say they were going to prescribe an antibiotic. Which one, I asked? She gave the name. Oh, no, that one makes me anxious. The nurse notes that and says, it says here you are allergic to penecillan and aspirin. Oh, and sulfa drugs, I said. Oh, we'll put that on our chart.

The next day I get a recording from Walgreens saying there is some insurance problem with my prescription. So I call Walgreens and talked to the pharmacy tech, who said, your doctor just called in an antibiotic and you had just refilled that recently so it's not going through. Which antibiotic? The same one I was already on!!! Which I had mentioned in my first call to the nurse.

Plus, lovely TMI detail, all these antibiotics give me breakthrough bleeding because I'm also on the Pill. So I really want to get off the antibiotics since I've been on them 10 days now. And so I left a message with the nurse's station answering machine. I think I'll have to make an appointment. Sometimes they can inject the boil with steroids. They might not be able to since I'm still recovering from the Shingles...

I got a book out of the library last night, Stop Being your Symptoms: a 6 week mind-body program to ease your chronic symptoms. I'll let you know how it goes. I will try ANYTHING at this point.

Over and out, I need to chill with my book.

"I do not think that word means what you think it means..."

(from Princess Bride)

Shingles is a pain in my side. Fortunately for me, it's more a mental anguish that my body doesn't have energy than a literal pain in my side or on my head. My co-workers have not been as lucky. My one co-worker has it on her scalp and she can't brush her hair and she says that by 3pm it feels like someone has been pulling her hair all day.

And all the literature says, "Immuno-suppressed." Well, I may be fighting boils left and right, and I know my co-worker and I are both under a lot of stress as things change at work, but I have heard enough stories from people that weren't dying from cancer and shingles was just a symptom, a flag that said, oh guess what, you are REALLY sick.

And it's not just old people. It seems that Shingles is as pervasive as Mono, just not as well understood. I've heard of 14 year olds getting it, college students getting it...

Oh, and here's something. When you get it, start taking B vitamins and Vitamin C at therapeutic levels *right away* and aggressively. Your doctor won't tell you because "it's not proven that those work" (from my friend who is married to a doctor and deals with too many doctors). Avocado is a good food to eat a lot of. Also beta carotene.

This is not a scientific blog, but a place for me to be frustrated with the status quo of how doctors and patients operate in this first world country. It's all about germs and not about your body's mechanisms to fight it.