Well, first off, a trifle of good news: my calf problem is in fact just cellulitis, & I've gotten antibiotics to finish clearing it up. I have to say (immediately wandering off topic) that we were amazingly lucky in picking our doctor when we got here - she & her husband are in joint practice, are SF-fans (nuts) complete with photos shaking hands with Shatner (!) and a Deforest Kelly Award on the wall for providing medical services for one of the WorldCons, and she is so incredibly friendly, open and relaxed: we're never hurried through or given the brush-off, she never patronises us, she's quite open about her own medical issues (and issues with doctors' attitudes, to my great amusement), and we always feel well-informed, and well tended.
Not sure how we got so lucky, but she's the first doctor I've met since leaving NZ that understands (and complies with!) the concept of informed consent - not that all NZ doctors are up to scratch on that of course :) Given all the horror stories I'd heard over the years about American medicine and the mercenary nature of it, I feel like we've struck a tiny vein of gold in a bedrock of pure lead.
Yesterday, for instance, she spent an hour dealing with both of us (from our UK experiences, we'd learned to always to to appointments together, for a variety of reasons). By any other standards, that's at least twice what'd I would expect: and this is on top of the nurse conducting the initial formalities (weight check, temp check, taking initial notes as to the cause of the visit - all very efficient & a good idea of how to maximise the doctors' utility, I think).
And the hour was well-spent, don't get me wrong. In her relaxed & charming manner, she reviewed all our medications (quite a list, between the two of us!), checked symptoms, and carefully left openings to draw us out & find anything we might have been shying away from mentioning. All in all, really impressive as a technique, I think.
I was going to launch into another rave today, but it'll have to wait for another time: all of a sudden, I'm a bit busier at work - not actual functional things to do, just checklists and reports and paper-chasing for the new manager. Hmm, what do you call paper-chasing in the brave new world of email and the internet? Electron-chasing? pixel-chasing? tail-chasing?
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