Grumpy Old Man Time

I do not know if age is making me grumpier or if the world has become that much more annoying. I have a spam filter to protect my blog and email from being overwhelmed by the unscrupulous marketers. I also have an answering machine and caller ID so that I can screen my calls. I do not want to hear some disembodied voice urging me to re-elect Congressman bumblefuck, who I have been voting against for some thirty years now. What I wish I had is something that would allow me to deal with the standardization built into the inter-net databases everyone wants me to use. My HPO has been encouraging me to give them my email address so they can use it to confirm appointments and give me the results of lab tests and such. They promise that there are safeguards there to protect the information we are exchanging. Unfortunately, one of those safeguards is to match the information in my file. What they obviously fail to realize is that we do not get street delivery here in the mountains. Thus when their form asked me if my street address was still my proper mailing address, I said no. That is when I discovered that the form did not provide any way for me to enter the proper mailing address. This means that I cannot complete the form to give them my email address.

I mention this because I have recently run into some digestive tract problems. I have to admit that I have a white coat phobia. I really dislike being poked and probed. The first thing the doctor did was to scold me for not seeing a doctor in twenty years or so. He then looked down my throat and probed my rectum to see if there was any blood there. After that he sent me to the lab to have them run blood tests. He had me wait until some of the blood tests were complete. He seemed pleased by the results of the completed tests. He told me the other tests he needed to do could be done on an out patient basis.  He also mentioned something about a colonoscopy.

I told him that if he wanted to shove something up my butt he was going to have to get in line behind my insurance company and bank.

“We can postpone the colonoscopy,” he said. “I want them to insert a scope down your throat first.”

Perhaps it is a genetic flaw, but we simply do not have an orifice well suited for inserting cameras into our digestive systems. This is not something I am looking forward to having done, and they are going to do it tomorrow. There is little doubt in my mind that they will also want to do a colonoscopy sometime soon. The only good thing about reaching my age is that it beats the alternative.

I am sure you will be relieved by the fact that I do not intend to burden you with the results of those probes. I am already working on a story for next week.

First published in macsbackporch.foxtail-farms.com on Jun 29, 2010