basilmemories (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
basilmemories) wrote2009-09-09 12:30 pm
basilmemories) wrote2009-09-09 12:30 pm
Entry tags:
It'll be a miracle if this gets posted (nsfw)
A friend of mine suggested that I go into detail about my medical issues and present a more solid timeline. I’m about fifteen shades of tired at the moment, but it’s a good idea and I don’t want to forget to do it in the middle of trying to get an appointment set up.
Now I’m going to be honest here, I’ve made mistakes and bad decisions. If anyone who stumbles on this wants to call me out on it, sure, go right ahead. Just please try to keep it civil.
Military health care:
Long before any of this mess started, I was a grade A military brat. I lived on a base, in some cases I moved around (with my other relatives who were in the military, and for other reasons), and in general when there was an issue I usually found myself at a military clinic. Even though my dad had some screwups with the navy doctors, for the most part my care was pretty good. The thing about military doctors is that they seem to lack the pride that normal doctors have, so when you say that they might be wrong and why, there was a good chance that they’d listen to you. There were problems, natch. They tended to be better at getting preventive and minor care done, but they waffled on major issues. Other problems consisted of things like the emergency room that my parents ended up taking me to was about two hours away. I’m not sure if this was because they could only take me to a medical hospital to be covered or what, but I was about nine when it last happened, so at the time it didn’t really matter to me.
I’ll admit it, the doctors on the base knew me well. Mix one tomboy with hills, sports equipment, friends who liked to play rough, and a distinct lack of common sense, and it was almost guaranteed that I ended up in the local clinic at least every other month. This wasn’t a big deal for me since the clinic was literally five minutes away if I walked slowly. In short, I had a lot of experience in comparing military care to community and private care later on.
Things changed around middle school though. The base started tearing down the old and outdated buildings, and so I found myself having to get a ride to a medical center covered by Tricare. The doctor who I was assigned to was wonderful at her job, and reassuring me about any worries I might’ve had. Before I get to the first sign of what was to come for my medical treatment, let’s quickly move to the oh-so-neglected dental matter.
At this time two things were occurring, my mother was starting to have problems with our dentist, and my parents were heading towards a divorce. This will become important later. On the dentist front apparently he became bitchy, started including hidden fees, and demanding to do deep root cleaning on my mother, which hurt her every time, and he wouldn’t clean her teeth on a regular basis unless he got to do it his way. There might have been other issues, but either way we still had insurance, so we took our business elsewhere. It was at the new dentist that I got sealant on my molars. On one of the back ones I commented that the sealant was rough and making it hard to floss (when I did floss, that is). Despite this, it took me complaining on three separate visits to get him to file enough away that it didn’t feel rough on my tongue and shred the floss. I also had crooked teeth, but I didn’t want to add the social stigma of having braces on top of being the nerdy kid who said stupid shit at school. Fault on me there. I think the big moral of this story is “floss and get braces if you need them”.
Things I should have seen coming:
Back to high school however, and a nice indicator of some of the problems I’d be facing. Now I had concerns about my thyroid being out of sync, and so they did the first few preliminary tests, when nothing came up and I pressured her some more, that’s when things changed. See, at the time one of the counselors I was seeing suggested that my thyroid could be responsible not only for my weight issues (I thought I was a fatty little fat fat even then), but also my depression. So I wanted to kill two birds with one stone if I could. The doctor... didn’t really seem to like being told that she should do more tests. She emphasized that there was only really one more test they could run, but she doubted that anything was wrong with me at all in that regard. I made it clear that yes, I wanted the test done. Let’s face it, if you thought that you were in danger of having your thyroid fail on you, and your doctor was being lazy for some reason, you’d push for the test too.
So she gave me a referral, problem was that the only place that did this test was up far, far out of the range I could bus to. See, in some places friends and family will give you a ride, not so much in Marin County. Even before gas prices were four dollars a gallon, your average parent or friend who had their license wouldn’t do jack shit for transpiration, even if the place was a mile “out of their way”. This problem still exists today because well, the busses in the North Bay like to come when they want to, not when they’re scheduled to (and they cut their routes down more each year while raising prices). For about a year or two I feared that I would be one of those cases where the doctor was wrong and the patient died from it. Considering that it’s been about ten years, I figure that she either was right, or I have the slowest-dying thyroid in the world.
This was also the time when the impact of my parents getting a divorce really happened. See, I’ll say a lot of things about the divorce, and that there was crap on both sides of it, but my dad really fucked us over. See, the divorce proceedings were held down in San Diego. We couldn’t get down there, so mom sent down a note about our situation and what we would need to survive... and the judge pretty much tossed it out and ruled in favor of dad. This meant that he essentially paid a tiny bit of child support to mom, kept me on the insurance until I was either nineteen or twenty, and helped us find an apartment, and that was the real end of his assistance. There were some things that mom could’ve done to get more out of him, but that’s her thing, and I don’t want to sling mud at her to any total strangers who read this.
The impact this had on our lifestyle was huge. Sure we had insurance, but the cost of having regular checkups and dental exams fell under the heading of “too expensive”, not to mention the cost of medication. So the doctor and dentist became things only reserved for emergencies, and even then if we could tough it out, we did. I always had decent teeth, so I didn’t really go to the dentist at all. Mom also had a bill there that she couldn’t really afford to pay, so that pressure also influenced my choice not to go in for my normal cleanings.
At least I got a bitchin’ scar:
When I turned either nineteen or twenty, I checked the machine to hear my dad’s voice telling me that I didn’t have coverage any more. This birthday present affected my medical issues more then my dental ones. I still got horribly sick at least once a year, and I was still just as accident prone and stupid as I was as a kid. So for a number of years I toughed it through illnesses, sprained joints, and at least one injury that left a scar on my ankle. A allergic reaction ended up landing me into the community clinic, and it was there that I encountered my first of many “Jaded Receptionists”.
See, they don’t really care. I don’t say this to be ungrateful, but no, really, I honestly don’t think they care. I’ve seen this same sort of reaction in my co-workers when I was working at the special needs home. Sometimes it gets called “burnout” and it’s what happens when people are overworked, or can’t help someone one too many times, or in this case they have to relay the horrible information that no, it doesn’t matter that you’re poor, if you’ve come here before and you don’t have medi-cal, it will cost you 100$ to be seen. It’s a coping mechanism, but it’s one that can be avoided by having a higher ratio of staff, more opportunities for staff to take that weight off their shoulders, more benefits for the staff so they don’t bring their problems to work, and so on. This in my opinion is why private care receptionists are a hell of a lot more friendly then community care.
And like those many other people, I didn’t sign up for medi-cal then. I have no excuse why I didn’t do it at that point years ago, that was me just being lazy, and not wanting to pester everybody into trying to give me a ride to the office to get it filed. At the time I didn’t have the money to get a prescription filled, and so the doctor bent the rules and scoured her cabinets for something. About five minutes later she returned with a brown paper bag with enough “samples” of medication to treat me.
Community health care needs more people like her. Thankfully, I didn’t have any major emergencies for a number of years, but I was always worried about it. I even gave up a wonderful job that I loved for a place that would give me health care. It was about here when my dental problems began.
Pretty sure that isn’t chowder:
The job I had was working at a special needs home, helping facilitate the residents and taking care of them when need be. Considering that the home was one level above a mental institution, you’d think that there’d be some pretty good medical coverage right?
Wrong. Not only did they pay most employees less then your typical Target employee, but their medical benefits kicked in only after nearly a year. It was a little over two years ago that I found myself pausing at a bit of food, thinking that I had a little “grit” left over in my mouth from some chowder. It had occurred before in the day, but that was right after I had the meal, so it only seemed natural.
This was hours after the fact. I spit into a napkin and realized that this was larger then any piece of sand could be, and most importantly, was white. One of my back molars was literally crumbling away. To say I was frightened is a fucking understatement, but I was on the job, didn’t know dental care costs at all, and had another nine hours left on my shift. I took care of my tooth and tried not to think about it too much until the morning. At the time I was still regularly employed, so for a few days I had to go around with a hole in my tooth and barely eating anything. The dentists I called were less then helpful. One outright refused to even give me a ballpark figure for a filling, another one gave me a tentative figure of nearly four hundred dollars, and many, many more said they would talk about it after they got me into the chair (which carried with itself a “consultation fee”).
Eventually I found one who gave me an “affordable” rate of 375$ for the procedure. She informed me that she could just treat it like a filling, but there was a good chance that I really needed a root canal. Her rates for that were much MUCH less encouraging. I also had been talking with a friend of mine who was the son of an oral surgeon, and he had informed me of what he felt were serious dangers of petroleum-based local anesthetics. I make no excuses here. I should have known about the phrase “correlation does not equal causation”. I should have stayed in that chair and let her start drilling and see just how bad it really had been. If I had, perhaps it would have been fine and not needed a root canal after all.
But I didn’t. I asked her about using a non-petrol based local, and she claimed she wasn’t trained in that. This is when she pointed me towards the UCSF dental school.
(This all was recorded here: http://basilmemories.livejournal.com/38257.html)
I should’ve turned my ass right around and gone back to her when I had a bad feeling about the place, but I’m an idiot. Originally the UCSF staff gave me the runaround until I explained just what the situation was, in an annoyed tone and barely resisting the urge to use sock puppets just to be as condescending to them as they were to me. This would have been pointless as we were talking over the phone, but it’s the thought that counts.
(This event was recorded here: http://basilmemories.livejournal.com/38594.html)
The Emergency visit was pleasant, for what it entailed. The first-years had someone to look over their shoulder, and made sure to go through all the steps. Sure the needle going in was painful, but they “felt for marks”, which means that they located where the vein was without just assuming it was at X location, and then stuck the needle in. This will be important later. As the comment Black_Magician made indicates, things didn’t stay rosy.
(This event was recorded here: http://basilmemories.livejournal.com/39156.html)
Insert “is it safe” joke here:
This is the event I tend to tell people about when I want to give them a nice horror story. This wasn’t done by a first-year messing up; this was done by a third-year, in the school’s eyes practically a graduate. A man who I hope got his license yanked or sued by one of his clients. His arrogance and carelessness led to the most pain I’ve ever felt in my life. He is the single reason I start to feel lightheaded and nauseous when I even sat in a dentist’s chair, he is the reason that I have continued to have a swelling and infection off and on again for two years around where he injected the needle.
And to this day he never directly apologized for it. I don’t hate many people, but I actively hate this man, and I hope that someday karma makes him pay for it in spades.
What occurred is this: He sat me down in the chair, Black_Magician coming along to help me get home after the surgery and for moral support. We had talked about the local anesthetic problem before and I had commented that dentists tend to give me too much and that it lasts longer. He said he’d give me a bit less then, just to even it out. Here is what I like to call a grey zone of accountability. On my end, I told him that it affects me harder then other people, on his end, he should know his anesthetics and if he felt there was a risk of something, he should have stayed firm on giving me the recommended dose. This would be the primary reason I didn’t raise hell back then, I didn’t think I had a legal leg to stand on.
The first thing I notice is that he doesn’t look for marks. Now my mouth had an impacted wisdom tooth, he knew this, he saw the x-rays. It’s also apparently standard procedure to look for marks because everyone’s mouths aren’t the same. Despite this he just picked what he felt was the right spot and jabbed the needle in. If I was smart I would have called him on it, but I didn’t. I trusted him because I had been told time and time again that he was just as good as someone about to graduate, almost a professional. This was a godamn mistake.
I notice something doesn’t feel right, he asks me if the area is numbed yet and I tell him that it doesn’t entirely feel like it. He says to wait a few more minutes, he asks again and I tell him the same thing. His comment is that it had been at least fifteen minutes, and by now I should be ready. Things... go okay at first, at least until they get to the spot where they remove the temporary filling and start to get to work. That’s about when I first got hit with the pain. It’s not like I really hid it, what with the screaming and all.
The problem with me typing out this part is that I literally don’t have patches of memory when it comes to this surgery. The pain itself is something I only remember as “the most terrible experience of my life”. I can say that it felt like prodding an open wound with a needle (but much, much worse), but I can’t bring up the memory of what that really feels like. What I honestly have are select moments in between the gaps:
I remember for most of it staring directly into a camera and wondering if it’s actually on, and if it is, is that guy going to get caught for what he was doing to me. I remember getting rid of the bite block because I felt like I couldn’t breathe with it in. I remember him repeatedly injecting more and more anesthetic into various parts of that area of my gums, and never in the place that the first-years stuck their needle. He never felt for marks. At one point he gets the smallest needle I’ve ever seen and injects something down into the four roots themselves. THAT I can manage to describe for you. Imagine accidentally getting a sewing needle pricking you underneath your nail by accident. Now imagine someone deliberately shoving it in further. I recognized the name of the local he used for that, and it was some of the stuff I had wanted them to use on me in the first place. I asked him why the hell he didn’t use it before, and his comment was, “It wouldn’t be safe”. I learn later on from friends who asked their dentists, that this is a bald-faced lie. He asked me after that if it was working, I tell him no, and he says that he can’t give me any more, and that I’ll “Just have to deal with it”. I remember shaking my head “no” and then regretting it, because what if he stops and I’d gone through the pain and still just have an empty tooth? He didn’t anyway.
I feel each and every one of those roots get snapped. The pain in that part of my mouth only stops because the roots are dead. The injection site still hurts, but compared to the roots getting cleaned out, it’s nothing. I remember a hell of a lot more after that. Black_Magician comments that if I had kept on screaming she would have gotten annoyed. I remember being more then a little glad that I didn’t lose control of my system during the surgery. He seals things up, and I get the hell home with my friend.
All of the visits other then the very last one are detailed here: (http://basilmemories.livejournal.com/39463.html)
Corporations and medical centers don’t have calendars, trufax:
The last one was the time when I gave up on the bastards. I go in for an exam, which was a orthodontist telling me that I have impacted wisdom teeth, saying that they need to be removed, and then charging me fifty bucks for something I already knew. I get assigned another first year for what’s going to be “routine” care from now on, aside from the crown and such. When I can afford the crown, that is. I mention that yes, the cavities I have are important, but I don’t want the tooth I have to collapse after paying a shitload of money on it. He tells me that I’ll need to think realistically. He said to give the swelling and pain in my jaw six months before it would normalize. I inform him of what went on, and he doesn’t seem phased by it, hell I’d be surprised if he was listening to what I was saying at all. He shows me the price charts, and they’re bad, it’s at least another 1500$ before I start even looking at the prices for wisdom teeth. I mention the convention coming up, because hey, at that time I had the money to go to a con and I personally felt that I needed the vacation after what I’d gone through.
The date he proposes is two days before the convention, which would keep me from going. This is after I told him about it multiple times and said the exact date. I was fucking done with that place. The constant dismissal of my pain and concerns, the lack of help in obtaining financial aid, the fees that kept adding to an amount that was well over what I was quoted at the beginning. I had taken off so many days from work to bus into the city for my appointments that I was taking a major hit to my paycheck even before I got the bills. When I had a choice I tried to go in on my days off, which meant that for that period of time my life was a rotation of either being at work or at the dentist’s office. And that sonofabitch was telling me that he didn’t give a shit about what my situation was like.
I told him that I’d only be coming back here if Medicare covered it, and even then, I’d be looking for other options. Now this? This is another one of those “I’m a moron” points. If I were smart I would have sat my ass back down in that chair and got the appointment and gone to the con next year. But I didn’t. Seeing a trend here? Yep I thought so.
But! You say, what about the Medicare? Let me tell you about the Medicare in Marin County. The office to get your application filed opens at 8:30 am. There is usually a line far, far before that. They don’t do appointments, and so it’s first-come, first-serve, and they have very limited slots. You have a week to get your application filed, or they automatically get turned down. This is what happened to me.
In the time between then and now I had about two years of sensitivity in my teeth, recurring infections in the area near the needle site, and the place where one of my wisdom teeth have erupted. My new goal was to find a place with dental care...
Oh wait, I never said that my old job didn’t offer dental? Yep, that’s right. The people who take care of some of the special needs clients don’t get dental. Or visual. By that time I had been slotted down to only one day a week anyway, so I couldn’t afford dental on my own.
I was recruited by Target, which for a company does a few things right, and a few things wrong. There’s a good number of days when I wanted to punch management, but they had dental and medical after six months, so I was going to hang on for dear life, or until I found a place that paid better and had benefits too.
They fired me on the 9th of November. A few days later In the mail I get the packet saying I’ve been approved for medical and dental benefits. A few days after that I get the note saying my benefits are cancelled unless I pay a hundred a month. Seeing as I was unemployed, I had to turn down that offer. Since they fired me, my unemployment claim was denied. Now, I won’t say that they probably had a good reason to can me, but a lot of things just don’t look right when you add everything up.
A few months ago I found myself calling up community hospitals for the UTI that had developed to the bladder pain and urinating blood stage. The main location told me that there was a waiting list for two weeks. In the end a Sutter location was able to take care of me, despite my unemployed status. I still owe them 150$ however. Plus another medical bill from another location for 250$ for something I don’t even remember going in for.
And now you know the rest of the backstory:
My tooth started smelling foul around January, I think. Sensitive as all hell, reacted to cold liquids, the whole deal. I didn’t have a job, what could I do other then take painkillers and keep looking for work? So that’s what I did. It took me until around June of this year to become employed again. After a month my boss cut me down to one day. The old man who does the night shift didn’t want to work days, and my boss said that I wasn’t ready to do five-million things at once in a metal building in the summer. But I had money saved up, theoretically I could have gone and got my tooth fixed, I could have paid my medical bills.
I’m. A. Fucking. Idiot.
I caved to the idea of seeing friends and getting away from a turbulent situation at home. If I had an ounce of sense in my head, I would have stashed the money and seen a dentist. In my defense, I regretted it the moment I bought the tickets, but they were non-refundable. I went to Baltimore, had fun for the most part, and hoped to god that this wouldn’t bite me in the ass.
July was the month that dental care under medi-cal was reduced to just extractions. Any dentist tries to warn you away from those because they just result in more tooth loss down the road. A few days ago my friend who’s the son of the oral surgeon told me that it sounds like I have an abscessed tooth, and that can kill me in as little as two weeks. Should I believe someone who gave me dubious information two years ago? I don’t know. But from talking to the various dental receptionists over the last few days, he sounds like he might be on the mark.
The rest is in the posts I’ve got linked by this tag. I’m going to sum up this freakin’ novel by saying this: I’ve made mistakes before. At this rate I’m going to make them again. Does that excuse my actions? Not in the least.
But there are a lot of people out there like me, people who were, or are, or will be idiots and do something that will jeopardize their health. There are people who still think that if they go to a Medicare office they will be covered, unaware of the cuts to these services. They may think, like I used to, that you can pay in installments. People may be unaware of the costs for what amounts to surgery on a portion of your mouth only a few centimeters large. The working poor and the elderly and the disabled may think that they have a safety net, only to find out that they’re largely on their own in California. People have died in other states from a lack of basic dental care, people will die in this state from the same thing. We shouldn’t wait until someone other then a homeless person or people who are below the poverty line kicks the bucket. We should be working on this now, because hell, in this state at the moment, any one of us could become just another person that gets shuffled through the community clinics.
Now I’m going to be honest here, I’ve made mistakes and bad decisions. If anyone who stumbles on this wants to call me out on it, sure, go right ahead. Just please try to keep it civil.
Military health care:
Long before any of this mess started, I was a grade A military brat. I lived on a base, in some cases I moved around (with my other relatives who were in the military, and for other reasons), and in general when there was an issue I usually found myself at a military clinic. Even though my dad had some screwups with the navy doctors, for the most part my care was pretty good. The thing about military doctors is that they seem to lack the pride that normal doctors have, so when you say that they might be wrong and why, there was a good chance that they’d listen to you. There were problems, natch. They tended to be better at getting preventive and minor care done, but they waffled on major issues. Other problems consisted of things like the emergency room that my parents ended up taking me to was about two hours away. I’m not sure if this was because they could only take me to a medical hospital to be covered or what, but I was about nine when it last happened, so at the time it didn’t really matter to me.
I’ll admit it, the doctors on the base knew me well. Mix one tomboy with hills, sports equipment, friends who liked to play rough, and a distinct lack of common sense, and it was almost guaranteed that I ended up in the local clinic at least every other month. This wasn’t a big deal for me since the clinic was literally five minutes away if I walked slowly. In short, I had a lot of experience in comparing military care to community and private care later on.
Things changed around middle school though. The base started tearing down the old and outdated buildings, and so I found myself having to get a ride to a medical center covered by Tricare. The doctor who I was assigned to was wonderful at her job, and reassuring me about any worries I might’ve had. Before I get to the first sign of what was to come for my medical treatment, let’s quickly move to the oh-so-neglected dental matter.
At this time two things were occurring, my mother was starting to have problems with our dentist, and my parents were heading towards a divorce. This will become important later. On the dentist front apparently he became bitchy, started including hidden fees, and demanding to do deep root cleaning on my mother, which hurt her every time, and he wouldn’t clean her teeth on a regular basis unless he got to do it his way. There might have been other issues, but either way we still had insurance, so we took our business elsewhere. It was at the new dentist that I got sealant on my molars. On one of the back ones I commented that the sealant was rough and making it hard to floss (when I did floss, that is). Despite this, it took me complaining on three separate visits to get him to file enough away that it didn’t feel rough on my tongue and shred the floss. I also had crooked teeth, but I didn’t want to add the social stigma of having braces on top of being the nerdy kid who said stupid shit at school. Fault on me there. I think the big moral of this story is “floss and get braces if you need them”.
Things I should have seen coming:
Back to high school however, and a nice indicator of some of the problems I’d be facing. Now I had concerns about my thyroid being out of sync, and so they did the first few preliminary tests, when nothing came up and I pressured her some more, that’s when things changed. See, at the time one of the counselors I was seeing suggested that my thyroid could be responsible not only for my weight issues (I thought I was a fatty little fat fat even then), but also my depression. So I wanted to kill two birds with one stone if I could. The doctor... didn’t really seem to like being told that she should do more tests. She emphasized that there was only really one more test they could run, but she doubted that anything was wrong with me at all in that regard. I made it clear that yes, I wanted the test done. Let’s face it, if you thought that you were in danger of having your thyroid fail on you, and your doctor was being lazy for some reason, you’d push for the test too.
So she gave me a referral, problem was that the only place that did this test was up far, far out of the range I could bus to. See, in some places friends and family will give you a ride, not so much in Marin County. Even before gas prices were four dollars a gallon, your average parent or friend who had their license wouldn’t do jack shit for transpiration, even if the place was a mile “out of their way”. This problem still exists today because well, the busses in the North Bay like to come when they want to, not when they’re scheduled to (and they cut their routes down more each year while raising prices). For about a year or two I feared that I would be one of those cases where the doctor was wrong and the patient died from it. Considering that it’s been about ten years, I figure that she either was right, or I have the slowest-dying thyroid in the world.
This was also the time when the impact of my parents getting a divorce really happened. See, I’ll say a lot of things about the divorce, and that there was crap on both sides of it, but my dad really fucked us over. See, the divorce proceedings were held down in San Diego. We couldn’t get down there, so mom sent down a note about our situation and what we would need to survive... and the judge pretty much tossed it out and ruled in favor of dad. This meant that he essentially paid a tiny bit of child support to mom, kept me on the insurance until I was either nineteen or twenty, and helped us find an apartment, and that was the real end of his assistance. There were some things that mom could’ve done to get more out of him, but that’s her thing, and I don’t want to sling mud at her to any total strangers who read this.
The impact this had on our lifestyle was huge. Sure we had insurance, but the cost of having regular checkups and dental exams fell under the heading of “too expensive”, not to mention the cost of medication. So the doctor and dentist became things only reserved for emergencies, and even then if we could tough it out, we did. I always had decent teeth, so I didn’t really go to the dentist at all. Mom also had a bill there that she couldn’t really afford to pay, so that pressure also influenced my choice not to go in for my normal cleanings.
At least I got a bitchin’ scar:
When I turned either nineteen or twenty, I checked the machine to hear my dad’s voice telling me that I didn’t have coverage any more. This birthday present affected my medical issues more then my dental ones. I still got horribly sick at least once a year, and I was still just as accident prone and stupid as I was as a kid. So for a number of years I toughed it through illnesses, sprained joints, and at least one injury that left a scar on my ankle. A allergic reaction ended up landing me into the community clinic, and it was there that I encountered my first of many “Jaded Receptionists”.
See, they don’t really care. I don’t say this to be ungrateful, but no, really, I honestly don’t think they care. I’ve seen this same sort of reaction in my co-workers when I was working at the special needs home. Sometimes it gets called “burnout” and it’s what happens when people are overworked, or can’t help someone one too many times, or in this case they have to relay the horrible information that no, it doesn’t matter that you’re poor, if you’ve come here before and you don’t have medi-cal, it will cost you 100$ to be seen. It’s a coping mechanism, but it’s one that can be avoided by having a higher ratio of staff, more opportunities for staff to take that weight off their shoulders, more benefits for the staff so they don’t bring their problems to work, and so on. This in my opinion is why private care receptionists are a hell of a lot more friendly then community care.
And like those many other people, I didn’t sign up for medi-cal then. I have no excuse why I didn’t do it at that point years ago, that was me just being lazy, and not wanting to pester everybody into trying to give me a ride to the office to get it filed. At the time I didn’t have the money to get a prescription filled, and so the doctor bent the rules and scoured her cabinets for something. About five minutes later she returned with a brown paper bag with enough “samples” of medication to treat me.
Community health care needs more people like her. Thankfully, I didn’t have any major emergencies for a number of years, but I was always worried about it. I even gave up a wonderful job that I loved for a place that would give me health care. It was about here when my dental problems began.
Pretty sure that isn’t chowder:
The job I had was working at a special needs home, helping facilitate the residents and taking care of them when need be. Considering that the home was one level above a mental institution, you’d think that there’d be some pretty good medical coverage right?
Wrong. Not only did they pay most employees less then your typical Target employee, but their medical benefits kicked in only after nearly a year. It was a little over two years ago that I found myself pausing at a bit of food, thinking that I had a little “grit” left over in my mouth from some chowder. It had occurred before in the day, but that was right after I had the meal, so it only seemed natural.
This was hours after the fact. I spit into a napkin and realized that this was larger then any piece of sand could be, and most importantly, was white. One of my back molars was literally crumbling away. To say I was frightened is a fucking understatement, but I was on the job, didn’t know dental care costs at all, and had another nine hours left on my shift. I took care of my tooth and tried not to think about it too much until the morning. At the time I was still regularly employed, so for a few days I had to go around with a hole in my tooth and barely eating anything. The dentists I called were less then helpful. One outright refused to even give me a ballpark figure for a filling, another one gave me a tentative figure of nearly four hundred dollars, and many, many more said they would talk about it after they got me into the chair (which carried with itself a “consultation fee”).
Eventually I found one who gave me an “affordable” rate of 375$ for the procedure. She informed me that she could just treat it like a filling, but there was a good chance that I really needed a root canal. Her rates for that were much MUCH less encouraging. I also had been talking with a friend of mine who was the son of an oral surgeon, and he had informed me of what he felt were serious dangers of petroleum-based local anesthetics. I make no excuses here. I should have known about the phrase “correlation does not equal causation”. I should have stayed in that chair and let her start drilling and see just how bad it really had been. If I had, perhaps it would have been fine and not needed a root canal after all.
But I didn’t. I asked her about using a non-petrol based local, and she claimed she wasn’t trained in that. This is when she pointed me towards the UCSF dental school.
(This all was recorded here: http://basilmemories.livejournal.com/38257.html)
I should’ve turned my ass right around and gone back to her when I had a bad feeling about the place, but I’m an idiot. Originally the UCSF staff gave me the runaround until I explained just what the situation was, in an annoyed tone and barely resisting the urge to use sock puppets just to be as condescending to them as they were to me. This would have been pointless as we were talking over the phone, but it’s the thought that counts.
(This event was recorded here: http://basilmemories.livejournal.com/38594.html)
The Emergency visit was pleasant, for what it entailed. The first-years had someone to look over their shoulder, and made sure to go through all the steps. Sure the needle going in was painful, but they “felt for marks”, which means that they located where the vein was without just assuming it was at X location, and then stuck the needle in. This will be important later. As the comment Black_Magician made indicates, things didn’t stay rosy.
(This event was recorded here: http://basilmemories.livejournal.com/39156.html)
Insert “is it safe” joke here:
This is the event I tend to tell people about when I want to give them a nice horror story. This wasn’t done by a first-year messing up; this was done by a third-year, in the school’s eyes practically a graduate. A man who I hope got his license yanked or sued by one of his clients. His arrogance and carelessness led to the most pain I’ve ever felt in my life. He is the single reason I start to feel lightheaded and nauseous when I even sat in a dentist’s chair, he is the reason that I have continued to have a swelling and infection off and on again for two years around where he injected the needle.
And to this day he never directly apologized for it. I don’t hate many people, but I actively hate this man, and I hope that someday karma makes him pay for it in spades.
What occurred is this: He sat me down in the chair, Black_Magician coming along to help me get home after the surgery and for moral support. We had talked about the local anesthetic problem before and I had commented that dentists tend to give me too much and that it lasts longer. He said he’d give me a bit less then, just to even it out. Here is what I like to call a grey zone of accountability. On my end, I told him that it affects me harder then other people, on his end, he should know his anesthetics and if he felt there was a risk of something, he should have stayed firm on giving me the recommended dose. This would be the primary reason I didn’t raise hell back then, I didn’t think I had a legal leg to stand on.
The first thing I notice is that he doesn’t look for marks. Now my mouth had an impacted wisdom tooth, he knew this, he saw the x-rays. It’s also apparently standard procedure to look for marks because everyone’s mouths aren’t the same. Despite this he just picked what he felt was the right spot and jabbed the needle in. If I was smart I would have called him on it, but I didn’t. I trusted him because I had been told time and time again that he was just as good as someone about to graduate, almost a professional. This was a godamn mistake.
I notice something doesn’t feel right, he asks me if the area is numbed yet and I tell him that it doesn’t entirely feel like it. He says to wait a few more minutes, he asks again and I tell him the same thing. His comment is that it had been at least fifteen minutes, and by now I should be ready. Things... go okay at first, at least until they get to the spot where they remove the temporary filling and start to get to work. That’s about when I first got hit with the pain. It’s not like I really hid it, what with the screaming and all.
The problem with me typing out this part is that I literally don’t have patches of memory when it comes to this surgery. The pain itself is something I only remember as “the most terrible experience of my life”. I can say that it felt like prodding an open wound with a needle (but much, much worse), but I can’t bring up the memory of what that really feels like. What I honestly have are select moments in between the gaps:
I remember for most of it staring directly into a camera and wondering if it’s actually on, and if it is, is that guy going to get caught for what he was doing to me. I remember getting rid of the bite block because I felt like I couldn’t breathe with it in. I remember him repeatedly injecting more and more anesthetic into various parts of that area of my gums, and never in the place that the first-years stuck their needle. He never felt for marks. At one point he gets the smallest needle I’ve ever seen and injects something down into the four roots themselves. THAT I can manage to describe for you. Imagine accidentally getting a sewing needle pricking you underneath your nail by accident. Now imagine someone deliberately shoving it in further. I recognized the name of the local he used for that, and it was some of the stuff I had wanted them to use on me in the first place. I asked him why the hell he didn’t use it before, and his comment was, “It wouldn’t be safe”. I learn later on from friends who asked their dentists, that this is a bald-faced lie. He asked me after that if it was working, I tell him no, and he says that he can’t give me any more, and that I’ll “Just have to deal with it”. I remember shaking my head “no” and then regretting it, because what if he stops and I’d gone through the pain and still just have an empty tooth? He didn’t anyway.
I feel each and every one of those roots get snapped. The pain in that part of my mouth only stops because the roots are dead. The injection site still hurts, but compared to the roots getting cleaned out, it’s nothing. I remember a hell of a lot more after that. Black_Magician comments that if I had kept on screaming she would have gotten annoyed. I remember being more then a little glad that I didn’t lose control of my system during the surgery. He seals things up, and I get the hell home with my friend.
All of the visits other then the very last one are detailed here: (http://basilmemories.livejournal.com/39463.html)
Corporations and medical centers don’t have calendars, trufax:
The last one was the time when I gave up on the bastards. I go in for an exam, which was a orthodontist telling me that I have impacted wisdom teeth, saying that they need to be removed, and then charging me fifty bucks for something I already knew. I get assigned another first year for what’s going to be “routine” care from now on, aside from the crown and such. When I can afford the crown, that is. I mention that yes, the cavities I have are important, but I don’t want the tooth I have to collapse after paying a shitload of money on it. He tells me that I’ll need to think realistically. He said to give the swelling and pain in my jaw six months before it would normalize. I inform him of what went on, and he doesn’t seem phased by it, hell I’d be surprised if he was listening to what I was saying at all. He shows me the price charts, and they’re bad, it’s at least another 1500$ before I start even looking at the prices for wisdom teeth. I mention the convention coming up, because hey, at that time I had the money to go to a con and I personally felt that I needed the vacation after what I’d gone through.
The date he proposes is two days before the convention, which would keep me from going. This is after I told him about it multiple times and said the exact date. I was fucking done with that place. The constant dismissal of my pain and concerns, the lack of help in obtaining financial aid, the fees that kept adding to an amount that was well over what I was quoted at the beginning. I had taken off so many days from work to bus into the city for my appointments that I was taking a major hit to my paycheck even before I got the bills. When I had a choice I tried to go in on my days off, which meant that for that period of time my life was a rotation of either being at work or at the dentist’s office. And that sonofabitch was telling me that he didn’t give a shit about what my situation was like.
I told him that I’d only be coming back here if Medicare covered it, and even then, I’d be looking for other options. Now this? This is another one of those “I’m a moron” points. If I were smart I would have sat my ass back down in that chair and got the appointment and gone to the con next year. But I didn’t. Seeing a trend here? Yep I thought so.
But! You say, what about the Medicare? Let me tell you about the Medicare in Marin County. The office to get your application filed opens at 8:30 am. There is usually a line far, far before that. They don’t do appointments, and so it’s first-come, first-serve, and they have very limited slots. You have a week to get your application filed, or they automatically get turned down. This is what happened to me.
In the time between then and now I had about two years of sensitivity in my teeth, recurring infections in the area near the needle site, and the place where one of my wisdom teeth have erupted. My new goal was to find a place with dental care...
Oh wait, I never said that my old job didn’t offer dental? Yep, that’s right. The people who take care of some of the special needs clients don’t get dental. Or visual. By that time I had been slotted down to only one day a week anyway, so I couldn’t afford dental on my own.
I was recruited by Target, which for a company does a few things right, and a few things wrong. There’s a good number of days when I wanted to punch management, but they had dental and medical after six months, so I was going to hang on for dear life, or until I found a place that paid better and had benefits too.
They fired me on the 9th of November. A few days later In the mail I get the packet saying I’ve been approved for medical and dental benefits. A few days after that I get the note saying my benefits are cancelled unless I pay a hundred a month. Seeing as I was unemployed, I had to turn down that offer. Since they fired me, my unemployment claim was denied. Now, I won’t say that they probably had a good reason to can me, but a lot of things just don’t look right when you add everything up.
A few months ago I found myself calling up community hospitals for the UTI that had developed to the bladder pain and urinating blood stage. The main location told me that there was a waiting list for two weeks. In the end a Sutter location was able to take care of me, despite my unemployed status. I still owe them 150$ however. Plus another medical bill from another location for 250$ for something I don’t even remember going in for.
And now you know the rest of the backstory:
My tooth started smelling foul around January, I think. Sensitive as all hell, reacted to cold liquids, the whole deal. I didn’t have a job, what could I do other then take painkillers and keep looking for work? So that’s what I did. It took me until around June of this year to become employed again. After a month my boss cut me down to one day. The old man who does the night shift didn’t want to work days, and my boss said that I wasn’t ready to do five-million things at once in a metal building in the summer. But I had money saved up, theoretically I could have gone and got my tooth fixed, I could have paid my medical bills.
I’m. A. Fucking. Idiot.
I caved to the idea of seeing friends and getting away from a turbulent situation at home. If I had an ounce of sense in my head, I would have stashed the money and seen a dentist. In my defense, I regretted it the moment I bought the tickets, but they were non-refundable. I went to Baltimore, had fun for the most part, and hoped to god that this wouldn’t bite me in the ass.
July was the month that dental care under medi-cal was reduced to just extractions. Any dentist tries to warn you away from those because they just result in more tooth loss down the road. A few days ago my friend who’s the son of the oral surgeon told me that it sounds like I have an abscessed tooth, and that can kill me in as little as two weeks. Should I believe someone who gave me dubious information two years ago? I don’t know. But from talking to the various dental receptionists over the last few days, he sounds like he might be on the mark.
The rest is in the posts I’ve got linked by this tag. I’m going to sum up this freakin’ novel by saying this: I’ve made mistakes before. At this rate I’m going to make them again. Does that excuse my actions? Not in the least.
But there are a lot of people out there like me, people who were, or are, or will be idiots and do something that will jeopardize their health. There are people who still think that if they go to a Medicare office they will be covered, unaware of the cuts to these services. They may think, like I used to, that you can pay in installments. People may be unaware of the costs for what amounts to surgery on a portion of your mouth only a few centimeters large. The working poor and the elderly and the disabled may think that they have a safety net, only to find out that they’re largely on their own in California. People have died in other states from a lack of basic dental care, people will die in this state from the same thing. We shouldn’t wait until someone other then a homeless person or people who are below the poverty line kicks the bucket. We should be working on this now, because hell, in this state at the moment, any one of us could become just another person that gets shuffled through the community clinics.
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