workers, and after spending over twelve agonizing hours in hospital waiting rooms, they told him, "No. You don't need what you say you need."
been playing with my yo-yo. Day in, day out. Day in, day out. It's like life--with a few marginal variations. Walk the dog. Rock the cradle. Sleeper. Living life the way I choose to is tough; I'm brutally unforgiving of myself, and I demand justice when life goes wrong, mostly because I know it won't be there. At least I can count on disappointment, a consistent stability in an up-down, up-down, up-down world.
How much bullshit do you put up with? I mean, have you ever examined what really goes on in your day? It is easier--even necessary--to just overlook the crap that piles up at the bottoms of our interactions with one another, down beneath the level of eye contact, near the dirt, where we are grounded. But sometimes, slogging through all that shit just pisses me off.
what are you going to do?" I asked him. I usually avoid patients who are hurting so obviously and so much as he--when I know there's nothing I can do to help. But I just couldn't let him stand there, lost and hurt, in the middle of the admitting department doorway. And there was no other way to address him, because he was beat. He'd been angry, but he couldn't fight anymore. He'd been broken down, and right there, staring at me in those beautiful Spanish eyes, was bloodshot agony and the jagged edge of giving up.
The number one HMO in the country defeated him. He needed detox, so they made him jump through hoops. He was sick, they said wait. He got sicker, they said, "Who are you?" He told them about the hoops, and they said, "Oh, those are the old hoops. Things changed recently. Sorry 'bout that." They brought out new hoops. He went to one hospital, then Fallon said, "Nope, go over here instead." He went, waited in the emergency room at another hospital, and eventually a doctor looked at him. He waited some more, got sicker. After a while a social worker interrogated him, and lied a little. More waiting, more sick. After days of phone calls, after dozens of conversations with clerks, nurses, docs, and social
workers, and after spending over twelve agonizing hours in hospital waiting rooms, they told him, "No. You don't need what you say you need."
he didn't know what he was going to do. When I asked, he slightly shrugged his shoulders and mumbled, "go home." He was weak and trembling, he was hurt. I took his hand in mine and said, "good luck." I held on for a moment, so close, but he was on the wrong side of something. I had to let him go.
Of the hoops, his own doctor said, "That'll cost more than his whole treatment!" "They have to justify their jobs," replied another doc, referring to the HMO. And justify they did; the patient's treatment didn't cost the HMO a cent.
I hate you, and I don't know who you are, I don't even know if there is a 'you'. Maybe 'you' are the nameless, faceless bureaucracy whose bullshit we all overlook--a criminal left unindicted because the perpetrator is a thuggish system, not a thug. Maybe it's just me I hate for tolerating that system, and even being a part of it. I don't know. I do know that hate is just a way of digging in our claws, a way to keep from feeling like we're sliding off the edge.
life is one pixel thick. Thinner than the page of a book, thinner than the silk of your underpants, thinner than your reflection on this monitor. I believe there are, right this second, enough computer screen-images available on the internet to paste the entire earth with a luminous mosaic of text and pictures; a cacophony of light. And they look almost the same on either side, except one side's not quite right. Life sucks when you are on its wrong side, one pixel away from where you ought to be, but life is a billion-gazillion pixels wide and long, and you can't get on the other side of it without going to the edge.
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