The Portal

If you are a college football fan, you probably think this post is about the NCAA Football transfer portal, which allows players enrolled at one school to transfer at any time as long as they have remaining eligibility.   It’s not.  This post is about the online Health Portal which comes with my health plan here in Utah.  By signing on to The Portal, I can make appointments with my doctors, request refills of prescriptions, check the dates of previous visits and review the results of those visits.   For person who doesn’t like using the phone, isn’t good with dates and doesn’t maintain a personal calendar recording everything I do (as my wife does), it is a Godsend for monitoring my health care.   Another feature is that results of tests, from simple blood work to MRIs, show up quickly in The Portal, often a day or two before the doctor gats back to you with the results.  That is a feature on which my wife and I have a difference of opinion.  She waits to hear what her doctor says about the results and I look as soon as the results appear in The Portal.

Doctor Doctor

School has always come easy to me.  There was a time when I would have seen that as bragging but in my fifties, a friend taught me the notion of being right sized in the universe, that is, knowing what you are good at, bad at and everything in between.  I do. And I’m comfortable with it.  Now, you might think that having school come easy would mean I was as the top of my class all the time.   That wasn’t the case because of some of the things I wasn’t good at were: focusing on grades instead of fun;  working hard in classes that didn’t interest me;  putting aside the personalities of my teachers; and caring about who was valedictorian.  So, while I made the honor societies, it was often by the skin of my teeth.  In college, I discovered fraternity life, so while I sometimes made the Dean’s list, sometimes I didn’t.  Parenthetically, college transformed me from a somewhat socially awkward high school kid to a fraternity social chairman and president, in the long run a transformation that would serve me well.   But at no point would anyone have termed me a scholar.  OK, Miss Rocco, my Latin teacher (yes, Latin) called me her on-again-off-again-scholar.  Fondly, I think, if with some frustration.

Dr. Doctor

Even if you have been stopping by Older Eyes – Bud’s Blog for a very long time, I doubt that you would know that Older Eyes is Dr. Eyes.  He’s a doctor.  I don’t talk about it much, on my blog or in my life.  It is a title I use only in business, and even then, I prefer to be called Frank once a client is aware of my credentials.   However, I do use my title when making travel and restaurant reservations because I get somewhat better service that way.   Of course, there’s often the question, What kind of doctor are you?  … then a slight disappointment, a sense that I’ve somehow deceived when I say, I have a PhD in electrical engineering.   The academically aware may even say something like, Oh, Piled Higher and Deeper, huh?   Occasionally, someone will ask, What does a doctor in electrical engineering do?    Oh, I develop advanced algorithms for the extraction of weak signals in noise, is usually a conversation killer.  My ego is fine with that.  Earning my doctorate was one of the most interesting experiences of my life, one in which I learned the true meaning of Pogo’s declaration that We have met the enemy and he is us. The degree has opened professional doors and if it gives me some extra respect until people find out I’m not a neurosurgeon, that’s just frosting.

Torn

Just in case anyone is checking up on me (yeah, right!), the reason my post is late today is that I spent the entire morning sitting in medical centers.  That seems to happen more as I age, not just because a variety of minor ailments keep popping up but because now that I’m on Medicare, my doctor, the good Dr. G, encourages me to come in for regular check-ups.   From 7:45 to 8:30, I was at our local St. Jude Heritage Medical Group lab, where my doctor had ordered some blood tests.  Nothing new, just keeping track of Older Eyes’ blood pressure and blood sugar, both of which can run a little high without medication.   Then it was on to the x-ray center of the main St. Joesph Healthcare Center to have my wrist x-rayed.   The wrist I hurt in a fall back in January.  The wrist that hasn’t gotten any better in spite of an assortment of supports and braces.  After x-rays, it was upstairs to see my new orthopedic surgeon and hand specialist, Dr. B … after a wait in the crowded waiting room, of course.   With the exception of one boy sitting with his Mom, gingerly holding his wrist, everyone in the waiting room was old, even compared to me.  Canes, walkers and wheelchairs abounded.  Back in the days when my trips to the orthopedic surgeon were for my athletic if someone incautious son, Aaron, I don’t remember there being so many oldsters.  Could it be that doctors refer us older folk to particular surgeons, those with the disposition to deal with curmudgeons?  Could it be that only those on Medicare have insurance that covers such elective procedures as sprained wrists or broken legs?  Who knows?

Friday Favorites 12/6/2013

When I was forty, I had a primary physician, Dr. Campagna, who was close to the perfect doctor for me.  He was my doctor.   My only doctor.  Oh, occasionally, I’d have to see a specialist for something … say, a tennis elbow operation or a torn meniscus … but they were one-malady-stands, not my doctors.  Between forty and sixty-nine, I have accumulated a few more medical companions.  There is my cardiologist who looked after me after several panic attacks posing as heart attacks and did a thorough workup when I passed out on my bicycle then crashed into a parked car.  I have my gastroenterologist who probes my insides every five years with a garden hose to make sure nothing unwanted has taken root there.  I acquired my urologist because … well, because an old(er) man needs a urologist.  I’ve heard older people complain about having to see doctors more often … and about the quality of medical care in the United States. I’m not one of those people.  My first sponsor … who is ten years older than I and traveled this path before me … always said, We’re lucky to live in a time when doctors can save us from ailments that would have been fatal only fifty years ago.  And my personal experience with doctors has been almost universally good.   That may be partly my attitude … I don’t expect them to be perfect and I’m rarely intimidated by them, even when they are arrogant.  They do work for me, after all, even if they don’t know it.