The Joys of Aging
I am so grateful to have medical insurance, even though I am paying much, much more for it than I used to. (My employer changed the amount the employees have to pay a while back.)
Two years ago, I went to the doctor because my leg was hurting. She said it was bursitis in my hip and gave me a brochure of exercises to do, along with icing the area. That was doing okay for quite some time. I would have occasional flares, but no consistent or very painful flares.
Two months ago I had a very painful flare and it hadn't gotten much better, so I made an appointment with the doctor. She emailed me to go in for blood tests also, since she had diagnosed me with diabetes in 2006. (She caught it early. After that initial reading that was over the border of normal into officially diabetic, it's never been high again. All subsequent readings have been in the normal range, but you can't be sure about these things, and diabetes is all over my family history.)
After noting what time I finished dinner last night, I rolled out of bed this morning early so I could be at the lab 12 hours later than my last meal. I peed in a cup and let them take blood then went home and had breakfast.
I returned for my doctor's appointment on bike, as it's only 2 miles away and driving is the thing which irritates my leg/hip the most. (It amuses me that people who work at Kaiser are always so impressed when I arrive by bike. Haven't they watched their own Thrive! commercials which show people bicycling?) So I came, dressed in layers for the morning coolness, topped by a bright yellow vest, and stood in line to register. They took my card and I paid my fee, and I sat down to wait for them to call my name. I took off the yellow vest, because it's really obnoxious - it's only for visibility (it was really gray out this week - I had a front light flashing as well) so I don't wear it once I've reached where I'm going. It was warm inside, so I took off the black jacket I was wearing. I waited and, feeling warmer, took off the distinctive green sweatshirt I also had on. At this point I'm in a gray T-shirt, which says "Not enough coffee." And I'm waiting and waiting. Everyone else who arrived after I had has been ushered in. I notice that the medical assistants who are ushering patients in are fingering a bright pink slip of paper stapled to the regular sheet. I ask the woman how much longer it would be, telling her who I was. She said they'd been looking for me! (I hadn't moved and I had given them money - I'm not likely to have walked out after that.)
They have a new system where they write what the patient is wearing on a pink slip of paper and attach that to the registration form. Rather than call your name, they wander around and approach people. I had seen them come up to people and then say the person's name, but frankly, I thought they were profiling -- they were going to the only man in an area or someone Hispanic-looking and saying a Hispanic name. So they're wandering around, looking for someone wearing a bright yellow bicycle vest. I had put that on the seat first, then put the other things on top of it. Aarrghh! It's getting cold now. We don't get snow here, but people do put on sweaters and coats and take them off when they are inside. That just seems like an incredibly stupid approach.
So I see the doctor and we go through the routine. We discuss options. A cortisone shot is one possibility. I had one years ago and, not only did the shot hurt more than others, the pain I had the next day was worse than the pain before the shot. So I turned that one down. She mentioned seeing a physical therapist, and that sounded good to me. I'd been talking to a woman in my church choir who is a PT, and she had recommended going that route. The doctor was able to set me up with a PT right away - someone just happened to be free.
So I met with a PT. She said to forget the strengthening exercises I had been doing and to do flexibility ones instead. They have a cool database of exercises set up now, so she was able to go in, select the ones she wanted, and print them out as a personalized set for me. (And they must be good - they hurt!) She also said to get a foam roll. She said they had them at Kaiser for $15, but they're 36" long, and I didn't think that would be practical to try to take back on my folding bike. It doesn't have much storage capacity. She said you could get them at Target, too, so I said I would try there.
The doctor also wanted me to get X-rays as they had never done that to verify there was nothing else going on, so I had X-rays today as well.
I'm such a geek -- I'm lying on the table, trying to remember the angle of incidence for X-ray electrons. I had seen the little sketches so many times of secondary electrons hitting something at one angle and backscattered electrons going in at a different angle. I resisted asking the X-ray tech because I was already asking her too many geeky questions.
Even with medical insurance, it was still $95 for the visit plus $50 for the X-ray. They'll send me a bill for the lab work, and that will probably be around $200. I don't understand why some people don't see the value of having universal health care. I'm not keen on paying this, but I have a health-savings account card through work which I put this on. (I pay in and the company pays in some as well.) One of the leading causes of bankruptcy in our country is people having a medical crisis when they don't have health insurance.
I hear people complaining about the children of illegal immigrants having access to health care. Do they think it's better for them to get sick and run around with contagious diseases? I just don't understand not just the selfishness, but the lack of awareness that this will impact them in the long run. We don't have kids but we support the schools. Today's kids are going to be running the place when we're elderly. I would like them to be competent at what they do.
Anyway, so later in the day, I was running errands and went to Target to buy a foam roller. They have them in the exercise equipment section -- for $44.99. Whoah. Did the PT have no clue what these things really cost? Or is it because there is also a DVD with the one at Target - an exercise video. Well, I just want it for PT. I don't need the video with the impossibly fit woman with abs of steel on it. Maybe it's the DVD which makes it so expensive. I'll try elsewhere.
After grocery shopping, I see that there's a Sports Authority just across the street, so I go there. Same thing. Hideously overpriced. I decide to go back to Kaiser in my car. I didn't see the rollers in the pharmacy, so I asked a woman who was stocking items if they had them there. She said they were actually in this other room - health care information room where I had met with the PT earlier. So I bought a foam roller for $15 at Kaiser.
(The exercise for this involves getting on the floor. You rest on the elbow on your good side while you slip the foam roller under your bad side. You rest the foot of your good leg on the floor, for stability, while you kind of slide lengthwise, hip to knee, against the roller. The PT warned it would hurt. She was right.)
One of the other exercises she gave me demonstrated why lying on my good side in bed is much more painful than actually lying on my bad side. You lie on the good side on the edge of the bed, good leg bent up towards you, and then you just lower the bad leg off the side of the bed and leave it there for 5 seconds. It stretches the leg-hip muscle and hurts like the dickens. (It probably wouldn't hurt *you* like the dickens, just me or other folks with a similar problem. The bursa is a soft tissue padding that can get inflamed, and that's what the problem is.)
Most of my blood tests are already back and the results are good. I haven't got the A1C back yet, but my triglycerides and fasting glucose were low.
I am also thankful for all my years at Hewlett Packard and all the quality control classes they had us take. At that time, HP was very big on every new trend coming out of Japan. I did Quality Circles. I took the class on Deming's procedure. I took Kepner-Trego. Some of the stuff is universally useful, though, and has stood me well. One type of analysis is a simple Is/Is Not analysis. To try to get to the root cause you determine what is and is not a problem. So I could go to the doctor and not just say, "my leg hurts," but that the pain is on the outside of the leg, it's not the knee, it seems to be a soft-tissue thing, it's not inner thigh or muscles on the top, etc.
This also has worked well for me at work. In our group, we often see the beginnings of problems in the line. Big ones are called excursions. And I work with a lot of non-native speakers who may not have seen what we're seeing before. So it helps if I can describe what something is and is not. We see the same wafers at different steps in the process. If I'm going to hold a lot for a failure analysis engineer, it helps them to know if this is a new problem for this wafer - if it passed with a low defect count on earlier operations - or if this is a known issue and we're just seeing it again. (All of our operations have a numeric spec. The data gets transferred and wafers will automatically go on hold if the number is too high. Then I have to determine if it's real or false. If it's false, I need to figure out why we have false data and what needs to be done to get real data and do that, whether it's cleaning the back or the wafer or tool's stage, running it on a different recipe, or writing a new recipe. If it's high and it's real, I have some guidelines, but at a certain point, the decision has to come from above.)
Two years ago, I went to the doctor because my leg was hurting. She said it was bursitis in my hip and gave me a brochure of exercises to do, along with icing the area. That was doing okay for quite some time. I would have occasional flares, but no consistent or very painful flares.
Two months ago I had a very painful flare and it hadn't gotten much better, so I made an appointment with the doctor. She emailed me to go in for blood tests also, since she had diagnosed me with diabetes in 2006. (She caught it early. After that initial reading that was over the border of normal into officially diabetic, it's never been high again. All subsequent readings have been in the normal range, but you can't be sure about these things, and diabetes is all over my family history.)
After noting what time I finished dinner last night, I rolled out of bed this morning early so I could be at the lab 12 hours later than my last meal. I peed in a cup and let them take blood then went home and had breakfast.
I returned for my doctor's appointment on bike, as it's only 2 miles away and driving is the thing which irritates my leg/hip the most. (It amuses me that people who work at Kaiser are always so impressed when I arrive by bike. Haven't they watched their own Thrive! commercials which show people bicycling?) So I came, dressed in layers for the morning coolness, topped by a bright yellow vest, and stood in line to register. They took my card and I paid my fee, and I sat down to wait for them to call my name. I took off the yellow vest, because it's really obnoxious - it's only for visibility (it was really gray out this week - I had a front light flashing as well) so I don't wear it once I've reached where I'm going. It was warm inside, so I took off the black jacket I was wearing. I waited and, feeling warmer, took off the distinctive green sweatshirt I also had on. At this point I'm in a gray T-shirt, which says "Not enough coffee." And I'm waiting and waiting. Everyone else who arrived after I had has been ushered in. I notice that the medical assistants who are ushering patients in are fingering a bright pink slip of paper stapled to the regular sheet. I ask the woman how much longer it would be, telling her who I was. She said they'd been looking for me! (I hadn't moved and I had given them money - I'm not likely to have walked out after that.)
They have a new system where they write what the patient is wearing on a pink slip of paper and attach that to the registration form. Rather than call your name, they wander around and approach people. I had seen them come up to people and then say the person's name, but frankly, I thought they were profiling -- they were going to the only man in an area or someone Hispanic-looking and saying a Hispanic name. So they're wandering around, looking for someone wearing a bright yellow bicycle vest. I had put that on the seat first, then put the other things on top of it. Aarrghh! It's getting cold now. We don't get snow here, but people do put on sweaters and coats and take them off when they are inside. That just seems like an incredibly stupid approach.
So I see the doctor and we go through the routine. We discuss options. A cortisone shot is one possibility. I had one years ago and, not only did the shot hurt more than others, the pain I had the next day was worse than the pain before the shot. So I turned that one down. She mentioned seeing a physical therapist, and that sounded good to me. I'd been talking to a woman in my church choir who is a PT, and she had recommended going that route. The doctor was able to set me up with a PT right away - someone just happened to be free.
So I met with a PT. She said to forget the strengthening exercises I had been doing and to do flexibility ones instead. They have a cool database of exercises set up now, so she was able to go in, select the ones she wanted, and print them out as a personalized set for me. (And they must be good - they hurt!) She also said to get a foam roll. She said they had them at Kaiser for $15, but they're 36" long, and I didn't think that would be practical to try to take back on my folding bike. It doesn't have much storage capacity. She said you could get them at Target, too, so I said I would try there.
The doctor also wanted me to get X-rays as they had never done that to verify there was nothing else going on, so I had X-rays today as well.
I'm such a geek -- I'm lying on the table, trying to remember the angle of incidence for X-ray electrons. I had seen the little sketches so many times of secondary electrons hitting something at one angle and backscattered electrons going in at a different angle. I resisted asking the X-ray tech because I was already asking her too many geeky questions.
Even with medical insurance, it was still $95 for the visit plus $50 for the X-ray. They'll send me a bill for the lab work, and that will probably be around $200. I don't understand why some people don't see the value of having universal health care. I'm not keen on paying this, but I have a health-savings account card through work which I put this on. (I pay in and the company pays in some as well.) One of the leading causes of bankruptcy in our country is people having a medical crisis when they don't have health insurance.
I hear people complaining about the children of illegal immigrants having access to health care. Do they think it's better for them to get sick and run around with contagious diseases? I just don't understand not just the selfishness, but the lack of awareness that this will impact them in the long run. We don't have kids but we support the schools. Today's kids are going to be running the place when we're elderly. I would like them to be competent at what they do.
Anyway, so later in the day, I was running errands and went to Target to buy a foam roller. They have them in the exercise equipment section -- for $44.99. Whoah. Did the PT have no clue what these things really cost? Or is it because there is also a DVD with the one at Target - an exercise video. Well, I just want it for PT. I don't need the video with the impossibly fit woman with abs of steel on it. Maybe it's the DVD which makes it so expensive. I'll try elsewhere.
After grocery shopping, I see that there's a Sports Authority just across the street, so I go there. Same thing. Hideously overpriced. I decide to go back to Kaiser in my car. I didn't see the rollers in the pharmacy, so I asked a woman who was stocking items if they had them there. She said they were actually in this other room - health care information room where I had met with the PT earlier. So I bought a foam roller for $15 at Kaiser.
(The exercise for this involves getting on the floor. You rest on the elbow on your good side while you slip the foam roller under your bad side. You rest the foot of your good leg on the floor, for stability, while you kind of slide lengthwise, hip to knee, against the roller. The PT warned it would hurt. She was right.)
One of the other exercises she gave me demonstrated why lying on my good side in bed is much more painful than actually lying on my bad side. You lie on the good side on the edge of the bed, good leg bent up towards you, and then you just lower the bad leg off the side of the bed and leave it there for 5 seconds. It stretches the leg-hip muscle and hurts like the dickens. (It probably wouldn't hurt *you* like the dickens, just me or other folks with a similar problem. The bursa is a soft tissue padding that can get inflamed, and that's what the problem is.)
Most of my blood tests are already back and the results are good. I haven't got the A1C back yet, but my triglycerides and fasting glucose were low.
I am also thankful for all my years at Hewlett Packard and all the quality control classes they had us take. At that time, HP was very big on every new trend coming out of Japan. I did Quality Circles. I took the class on Deming's procedure. I took Kepner-Trego. Some of the stuff is universally useful, though, and has stood me well. One type of analysis is a simple Is/Is Not analysis. To try to get to the root cause you determine what is and is not a problem. So I could go to the doctor and not just say, "my leg hurts," but that the pain is on the outside of the leg, it's not the knee, it seems to be a soft-tissue thing, it's not inner thigh or muscles on the top, etc.
This also has worked well for me at work. In our group, we often see the beginnings of problems in the line. Big ones are called excursions. And I work with a lot of non-native speakers who may not have seen what we're seeing before. So it helps if I can describe what something is and is not. We see the same wafers at different steps in the process. If I'm going to hold a lot for a failure analysis engineer, it helps them to know if this is a new problem for this wafer - if it passed with a low defect count on earlier operations - or if this is a known issue and we're just seeing it again. (All of our operations have a numeric spec. The data gets transferred and wafers will automatically go on hold if the number is too high. Then I have to determine if it's real or false. If it's false, I need to figure out why we have false data and what needs to be done to get real data and do that, whether it's cleaning the back or the wafer or tool's stage, running it on a different recipe, or writing a new recipe. If it's high and it's real, I have some guidelines, but at a certain point, the decision has to come from above.)