Jumping jeehosephat! I found out why I’ve been having all these issues with my healthcare providers at Kaiser.  Apparently, when you’re given a Stage IV diagnosis for any type of cancer, they treat it as if you were in the terminal stages and the only thing they can do for you is make you comfortable while giving you the medication you need to prolong you life as long as possible.

 WHAT BULLSHIT!

I spent two weeks in the hospital convincing those knuckleheads that I was NOT dying within the next twenty minutes and needed better care than I was receiving.  Needless to say, it was a losing battle.  What makes it worse is that the only provider who is willing to fight back with me that I’ve talked to since I’ve gotten out of the hospital is my internist, who is probably the least qualified individual, but it’s something, at least.  I spent an entire day with him, running tests, watching him play phone tag with other doctors and himself getting frustrated at the lack of assistance he was getting from his own colleagues.

The day before yesterday, I received a call from a colorectal surgical specialist’s office to make an appointment with him to get in there at the earliest oppportuntiy, which I found out wasn’t until the first week of February.  I told them I’d have to talk about that with my family, and asked if I could call back later.  By the time I called back, they had been closed for ten minutes and I resigned myself to call back the next day at 8:30 am (that’s right, I was going to awaken before sometime in the mid-afternoon!) when they called me first and set up an appointment for the very next day at 9:00 am.  Don’t ask me about the sudden rush to see me, and I’m not one to look a gift horse in the mouth, so I prepared to see this doctor the very next morning.

First, I discovered that he wanted me to have two enemas before I went down there, so I had one the night before, and that ended up keeping me awake all night long, looking forward to the second one.  In some ways, there was no difference in the two enemas, but to me, the second enema felt far more invasive and energetically draining.  So we left the house this morning at 7am.  All five of us:  Dad, Mom, Michelle, Sarah, and myself.  When I got checked in and settled in to his new hospital, I was called back to an examination room, where this specialist told me to relax in the most uncomfortable position I have ever managed to get my body into, but then proceeds to shove his arm up my nether region (i.e., my butthole) seemingly clear up to his shoulder, all the while telling me he’s sorry and that I needed to relax.

When he finally lets me up, he tells me to get back into my clothes and go to a different exam room with my family and he will let us know his thoughts on any possible procedure.  When he came in, he rather circumspectly stated that the only way he would take out my colon would be if my diagnosis was something close to as perfect conditions as was possible.  So on the bright side, this doctor helped me make a very difficult decision.  I’m going to do whatever it takes to remove myself from this HMO and find another way for me to get treated.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 4th, 2009 at 1:26 am and is filed under My Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.