People to People

You can imagine my delight to finally see that thin blue line next to C in the window, with nothing near T.  According to a little plastic stick, I’m done with Covid. However, my body didn’t get the memo. In fact, my coughing was so bad yesterday that it got into a weird danger zone where the impulse to cough came from a different place that had me gasping for air. I was sufficiently alarmed that I actually headed to the Kaiser Emergency Room at 11:30 at night. Checked in, sat in a room with five other people, some of them competing with me for the coughing prize and an hour later, none of us had yet been seen. I had some 20 minutes where I didn’t cough and decided to bail out and go home. 

 

Made it through the night alive and off I went the next day (today), feeling that my sickness was getting worse, 12-days later. I will skip the lurid details of trying to contact Kaiser through their oh-so-clever voice mails and nice advice nurses that promise someone will call me back who never does. Even, like today, when I called twice and said, “Can you mark this URGENT?!!!” They promised that a call back will come no later than 4 hours after the initial call and it didn’t. I felt like calling again and shouting “Liar! Liar! Pants on fire!” but couldn’t bear to go through the voice mail options again.

 

So I got in the car and drove to the physical hospital, checked in at Drop-in Urgent Care with a live human being at a desk, waited in a waiting room with other live human beings, got called into a room where an actual doctor stood in front of me and we had a good discussion about what might or might not be going on. She suggested more heavy-duty cough suppressants that she called into the pharmacy, chest X-rays to check for bronchitis or pneumonia and antibiotics in case the whole thing turned to those directions when in Europe. She was warm, personable and seemed confident we could turn this around. 

Why didn’t I go in earlier and skip all this telephone/e-mail protocol?!!!

 

Not in the mood to get into the details, but that’s the deal with all our oh-so-clever- electronic systems. We think they’re efficient, but they can’t really track the needs of someone who actually needs to talk to someone or better yet, see them in person. We’ve found the same thing with our Jot-form Summer Orff Course registration. The ap can take the name and address, but is ill-equipped to answer questions about visas or payment plans and such and we found people were falling in the cracks who we assumed were registered but actually were not wholly signed-up until we answered their questions. And be honest with me. If you had a choice of going through 25 voice-mail options that try to second-guess your question or actually talk to a human being who knows about these things, which would you choose?

 

So I stand by my conviction that flawed as we are, people to people is still the best way to go in just about anything. Especially health care. I suggested to one of the Medical Advice people that they urge my general physician to actually call me and check in as to how things we going. That I needed some TLC that no machine or e-mail could give. And guess what? She just called and we had a good conversation. So there’s hope for Kaiser after all!

 

In fact, the best thing I can say is that while waiting for my chest X-ray, I noticed a piano in the corner near the waiting room. I went over to play some Bach and Gershwin and such and noticed a woman being wheeled to the elevator changing direction to come my way. And later, a man who stood and listened and told me this was the best moment of his day. A human being playing music composed by other human beings that speaks to something called emotion that no machine understands, on an acoustic instrument, at that, with the physical vibrations real and tangible.

 

That’s what I’m talking about, people!