“But, Doctor, I’ve been waiting,”
Last night’s meeting went pretty well and I don’t want to go over it like a
couple looking for common ground after a party, but I kind of hated it that Dr F
told me to “Be patient” about the need for a healthcare system overhaul. People
can be nimrods and I’m sure he wouldn’t want to be the one to cause me
to chuck my re-authorization paperwork because things were going to change, I
get that, but once in a while, a little credit, even though I used to be blonde
and look tiny on camera, wouldn’t come amiss. I may not have major policy chops
myself, but I can talk to them without them asking about all the gibberish.
Doctors are just, you know, habitually patronizing, and I do forget. Even after
letting one tick me off at the meeting last month. Just being himself, too.
Besides, I am the most patient impatient woman alive. For years, during my growth spurts, I waited because my body outpaced insurance as far as needing my wheelchairs replaced.
Then, I waited for other people to decide if I could go to my local middle school(where I waited out my name being misread as Alicia on paperwork for about a year and a half. Now I know to have a trusted other person go over any handwriting I send to, well, The Man. Just in time for Docusigb, et all, to make everyone look worse than I.)
In high school, it took me about two years to come into myself, never mind any debate about, you know, my flower or anything.(Save it for college, everyone said, whether about my sex appeal or my commentaries, but very few people were interested in either. Just enough to maybe let me think I wasn’t an absolute error of a human.)
Sometimes to participate in conversations, I will recount a peripheral memory of college, but if I have one image of that time that’s consistent, it’s me carrying more than I should and probably hungry too because everything gave me stomach issues and I had to wander around with everything close at hand like the world’s palest Bedouin, waiting for a bus that sometimes decided it wouldn’t bother with the lift today.(Sorry, Michelle Obama, but for a golden ticket, that really, you know, sucked to the eleventh power, madam)
All to spend seven years on a degree people lost interest in in about seven minutes.
Trying not to be more than dark-chocolate level bitter, but between all that and the quarterly drama the system puts me through, the pandemic aftermath(ish) that curtails an already foreshortened list of social and dare I say sexual options( I will and I hope it gives DeSantis a pain in his gut) maybe the one thing I really know is waiting. Even if I am something of a washout as a Namaste Lady.
ETA: The failed promise of the ADA, unless you want to drop coin somewhere, could be a whole separate post. I was so excited! But I was also *sixteen* and now I'm forty-nine and my dentist can still shrug when I say "your office should be more accessible. " Sick of waiting on that, too. I swear, sometimes I want to grab Congress and shake 'em till the money falls out.
One day, I’m gonna get a turn at something, right?
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