Category Archives: breathe

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Juxtaposition

The photograph in my Quimper Family Medicine home clinic and guest room is of my grandmother and my daughter, in 1988. I took the picture. My grandmother is Evelyn Ottaway. The other picture is one of my mother/baby or parent/child pictures. I like the juxtaposition.

It’s not just parent/child that is important. It is parent/child, grandparent/child, great grandparent/child.

I am reading a book that appeared in my little free library box, about grandmothering skills. It’s got some very interesting ideas and I am enjoying it! Radical, man.

My grandmother had amazing organizational skills. I think that my daughter got them from her.

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: Radical.

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Deep Vein Thrombosis

Our clinic had a band back before 2009. Me and 4 of the nurses. We were into heavy metal. This was when I was working for Port Townsend Family Physicians. The county let me go and PTFP changed their name. Could not have been because we wore our band regalia to work, right? After all, it was Halloween.

Maybe they were afraid that the songs would catch on.

Little blue pill

Don’t code in the waiting room

Evidence based BM

Probiotics make you psychotic

Better that way

Alcohol is better than benzos

Mr. Sable is Unable

Buprenorphine: better n morphine

EMR means Eat My Rear

The 18 Patient Blues

Idaho Gigolo

I played flute and saw. J played fiddle and air siren. The others, well, you should ask them. I think all the tapes got burned by the hospital. Too bad, so sad.

I can’t credit the photographer. I don’t know who took it.

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patience

The Ragtag Daily Prompt today is patience. We still have some fog. We hope for clear sailing. We hope the fog bank will shrink. Right now we can see what is under it and avoid it. Patience, patience. Mask and immunize, please, please, push back the fog.

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Revolution in prior authorizations

I had a small one doc family practice clinic for ten years. Spent more time with patients. The trade off was that if they need a prior authorization, they had to come in for a visit. I would call the insurance company from the room face to face counselling and coordination of care and all that crap. This did a number of things:

1. I could bill for the time.

2. The patient saw how the insurance company treats us and our offices. The rep on the line would try to call me by my first name since doctors rarely call. I would say, “No, please call me Dr. Ottaway.”

3. The patients sometimes had called their insurances already and been told “Have your doctor call.” When I would call, the company rep would sometimes say, “We don’t cover that.” The patient would be outraged and say, “But I called YESTERDAY.” The rep would say, “I only talk to doctors. The part of the company that talks to patients is a different part.” The insurance companies can’t triangulate their way out of that.

4. I would end the call by saying, “This has been a face to face with the patient call, you have been on speaker phone and I am documenting the call and the time in the patient’s chart.” At first the calls took 25-30 minutes. Some companies apparently flagged me, and would say “Yes.” if I called, and get me off the phone as fast as possible. They really do not like it being documented in the chart.

5. Insurance companies sometimes drop patients on purpose because the person has gotten more expensive. I had a snow bird from Alaska whose insurance had dropped him. He said he’d paid on time. I said, come in if you want and I will call them. I spent 45 minutes on the phone where they made multiple excuses, lied (we can’t send you a copy of his insurance because we don’t have a fax after they’d said he was not allowed to leave Alaska and I said, “For how long? What do you mean? You don’t insure him if he’s out of the state? Send me a copy of his insurance contract!”) I finally realize that they have dropped him on purpose because he’s been diagnosed with diabetes. I say “Ok, look, I am staying on the phone until he’s reinstated and I don’t care how long it takes. And if you hang up on me I will contact the insurance commissioner in Alaska and Washington states.”

6. Patients are truly outraged at how a physician is treated when she calls an insurance company herself. I have to give my name, my NPI number, my address, my phone number, my fax number, the patient name, the patient address, the patient phone number the patient insurance number and sometimes have to do it every time someone transfers me. When they see me spend 25-30 minutes on the phone to get a prior auth, especially if it is refused, they are up in arms.

I think it would be truly revolutionary if every doc in the country called an insurance company with a patient in the room and documented the conversation in the chart. Wouldn’t that be fun?

Gonna be a revolution, yeah…..

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Mnemosyne

I am reading The Female Trickster: The mask that reveals, by Ricki Stefamie Tannen.

Regarding Mnemosyne, she writes: “The power of memory was recognized in Ancient Greece by the goddess Mnemosyne who ruled over the Elysian Fields. The nine daughters of Mnemosyne and Zeus are the muses, with Thalia, the muse of comedy imaged with a Trickster’s mask as she playfully composed comedy and ironic poetry. The muses were women unto themselves. According to the myth, upon death a person makes a choice to either drink from the river Lethe or the spring of memory. If you drink from Lethe you forget your pain and all the lessons of your life and are reborn again on earth. Those who choose to drink from the spring of memory go to the Elysian Fields, where there is no strife or pain. The myth tells us that the path to psychological integration comes from a willingness to value and interact with memory. Those that repress memory are doomed to repeat it, over and over again.” (pp72-73)

This seems apropos both to my personal and professional life and also to US culture. Our President speaks like my stage IV substance abuse patients. He says things that are obviously lies, obviously not true, obviously refutable and yet to all appearances he believes his own lies entirely, even when he contradicts himself. He manufactures his own reality and just laughs when someone else disagrees. But my substance abuse patients crash: they eventually find that they are isolated with their own lies when they become so fantastic and bizarre that no one believes them any more. We are watching that play out.

Re my personal life, I think of my maternal aunt’s memorial. I wrote two memories for the memory book. One was about my father saying that she had perfect pitch. I did not know what perfect pitch was when I was little, but I knew from my father’s voice, the respect, that it was special and important. That he was envious. That he admired it. The second was about my aunt and uncle’s divorce, that I had seen them as a unit and liked both of them better when they turned into individuals.

My cousins wanted to use the first memory but not the second. They said that family wouldn’t like it. I thought about their request and finally said no. Use both or neither. They chose neither. And this pretty much illustrates why I have very little contact from a large part of my family. I want to remember the whole person, light and dark, love them all. And that is not what that part of my family wants. An old family friend has not spoken to me about my sister since my sister died 6 years ago. I asked her directly about it a few months ago. She wants to talk to me “only about happy memories of your mother, father and sister.” I respond, “Why don’t you ask me what sort of relationship I want?”

She was and is silent. So I am too.

It’s not a lack of love but it’s a difference in philosophy. I think it is crazy to whitewash the dead: how will our children understand their own dark feelings and impulses and mistakes if they think that their ancestors, grandparents, parents are angels? Why aren’t we honest as a culture? How can we expect our children to be honest with us when we lie to them? The curated lives on Facebook are an abomination, false, lies and look what we have in the White House.

I like the dark as well as the light. If we truly love everything in the universe, how can we not love the dark as well as the light? If each of us owned our dark sides, our dark impulses, the myth says that we will not enact them over and over each generation. Owning the dark, acknowledging our own dark does not mean that we have to act it out in the world and then lie to ourselves and others.

And now I want coal for my stocking: just a small piece, to remind me that I have not always, or will I ever, only be good.