GIVE MY DAUGHTER THE SHOT! - an account including some of my telephone adventures

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Christ, the last two days have been so exhausting I can't even tell the whole story in detail. Suffice to say, between both of my parents and me calling repeatedly, I finally yelled at enough people to get my dad's pending referral changed from a regular referral (five to seven business days, what the FUCKING fuck, Dr. Original Surgeon, how many balls can you drop in a single week?!) to an urgent referral, and last I heard they were just waiting on the computer to spit out an authorization number which they will give to the folks at Clinic and the appointment can bloody well get scheduled and I tell you what, something like 20% of the time my dad has been sick has been wasted waiting for Kaiser to dick around getting paperwork together and this is not what one normally expects of them.

So finally (apparently) getting a result on that is one good outcome, and the other one is that after a couple of days of subterfuge I finally spoke to my dad directly and said Look, I know you don't see what was gained by Mom telling us ahead of time that you weren't going to meet Original Surgeon on Wednesday, but I'll tell you what was gained, [story of two days on the phone], and he agreed that we have energy he doesn't have to be chasing this shit down right now, so he's not at all upset that we've taken charge and harangued people into (eventually) doing what he needs done, not even that we've done it behind his back; and he's filling in a form to make my brother and me authorized People It's Okay For Them To Talk To About His Medical Records so it won't be a roll of the dice every time I call whether I'm going to get someone who will even speak to me.

None of this is stuff he should be angry about, of course, but you never know what people are going to choose to be unreasonable about, particularly when what's left of their stomach is full of who knows what.



So I am even more deserving of the fabulous shoes I ordered on Tuesday that arrived yesterday, but which I am not wearing today because I have to work out the best arrangement of shoes, socks, and trouser legs before just sailing forth. Also yesterday I built a bed frame - turns out it has eight legs, which is four on the corners and four right down the middle, like this:

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It's a standard 7 inches off the floor, so my boxes and whatnot won't go under there, but I don't want to put it back on the super-high lifts, so at some point I might get some mere 3-inch lifts and see if those work. Or, in the alternative, I've found another home for the boxes and may be able to work out alternative arrangements for everything else that normally lived under there. Further, the quilt is long enough that it reaches the frame on the sides, hiding the box spring, and therefore a bedskirt is not necessary.

I also retrieved my altered dress for my friend's wedding, so that is another task done; I tried on another dress when I was there, just for giggles, and while I love the copper-bronze color of the sequins this thing was made of, the color did little for me and the halter style did nothing at all. So it's a good thing I wasn't hoping to be tempted to buy it. :-P As a side note, though, why is it okay that one label's size 12 fits me just as well as another label's size 18? I mean the answer is it's not, and yet they can't manage to get their sizing together. Of course I'm not suggesting the fashion industry needs to be regulated, but seriously, wtf.

Professor has agreed I can take incomplete in my class, so I can accomplish the remaining written assignments without the deadline pressure on top of the hollering-at-people-about-dad's-referrals pressure.

For a shitty week, this one is turning out (cautiously!) sort of okay.

inspired by a kid having an epic tantrum at Target

I had my last PT session this evening, and popped over to Target on an errand afterward, where a real prizewinner of a tantrum was going on. This was a kid who was screaming and sobbing - so harshly that I saw more than one adult besides myself look around to see what on earth was happening. What was happening was that she was angry at her father, apparently; it was a girl of about two or three in an umbrella stroller and maybe it was past her bedtime? but her dad was pushing the stroller and speaking quietly to her and not yelling at her or yanking her around or any of the things you often see parents doing in public that always seem to me to be abetting their kids' difficult public behavior. He wasn't taking her out of the store, was the only thing, but it sure seemed to me to be a case of a kid who was screaming the walls down even though everything was actually objectively okay. But I was glad so many of us seemed to be so concerned.

This was just the latest instance in which I spent time thinking about responses to difficult situations. See above re: yelling at people over my dad's referrals, to take one example; see above re: State College, PA for another.

The other day, when I got home and checked my mail I saw that the neighbor's door next to the mailboxes was standing open a couple of inches. I froze for a moment. If the keys had been in the lock I'd have assumed their hands were full when they came in and they'd forgotten about it, but there were no keys. The latch didn't seem to be damaged. I gave a listen. I couldn't hear anything. This made me think it was less likely something nasty was happening at exactly that moment, which almost had me shrugging and heading up to my own apartment. But what if something did happen, I thought, and my ignoring the open door turns out to have been exactly the wrong decision (on the order of calmly waiting for a referral that was never entered, I mean to say, or of telling my boss I'd seen something awful but not telling anyone else, never mind stopping it in the first place). I made sure my keys were in my hand and carefully knocked on the open door.

And the downstairs neighbor came out from the kitchen and everything was fine and I told him I'd just seen the door open and wanted to be sure everyone was okay, and he thanked me and closed the door.

But do you know, if I'd walked on by, I genuinely don't know how well I'd have slept that night. Likewise this evening if I'd heard the kid screaming but not seen that she was just having a meltdown of her own, I think I'd still be worried. The question I'm thinking of more and more when potentially bad shit may be going down is, What will I wish I had done?