introspective periscope : peeking inside since Y2K ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- the problem with the primary care physician red moon night - twenty fifth of august, 2002 "i'm full of love inside."~matt pond perhaps i should be sleeping. but i can't. even if i wanted to. they put a second set of railroad tracks two blocks from my house. and now they're taking out the old tracks as well as concrete-ing in some level ground for all the little cars to drive over with out scraping the bottoms and making that horrid sound like they all do these days as each sedan does its best to make like the all terrain vehicles that the rich people up the hill own and cross the rugged tracks unscathed. and now they're to the part where the tracks cross the road right by my house. and they only do this part at night because of the traffic and one has no idea how to get to the rest of town because you see, we're people from the wrong side...the side cut off by the tracks. god forbid there be an emergency tonight. i don't know how we'd get away except by way of the river. and thats yucky. so i'm up. and thinking....mulling, even. today was okay. the cat stayed the whole night outside after a bad attempt at introducing her to our house and our dog. natural skeptics of each other, they are, and i can only hope that time will mellow them out to each other. hopefully before the kittens are born, although toy is getting fatter every day and i can sometimes feel them moving in her belly. its sort of neat. she woke up early and mewed me into wakefullness after the badly drawn boy woke me up on the stereo. i was glad to be awake and let her in while i got ready to go to cranberry for my ob/gyn appointment. it was a no go and i caught her before she tried to jump the hurtle from the bathroom window to the roof of the neighbors garage and let her out the front door. she spent the day lounging on our porch and feeding that fat belly of hers. she makes me happy. (but, i feel obligated to add, not nearly as happy as my verbil makes me. i am STILL a dog-person.) i don't know when i stopped being nervous about doctors. i used to get really uptight about going because i knew they were going to weigh me right from the start and i have always been a big girl. but as of about three years ago, i stopped caring about the doctors when i became a lot more comfortable with being me. and now, i can talk about things like my weight and my efforts to lose it with my doctors and i feel like i'm really doing a good thing for myself when i can be open about it. when i got my physical for my drivers permit (hah...a 23 year old with a drivers permit...the infinite jest), my new primary care physican and i talked about my weight and i explained about the gain i experienced after we were layed off from the distribution center in january. and i told her about the hiking we'd been doing. and she said that was all good. and i told her about my goals to play some rugby next fall when i return to iup next fall and wanting to be in shape. and she said that was good. and then, she suggested the unthinkable. and it didn't really hit me til today just how irritated it made me that she even brought it up. so the ob/gyn and i did our thing. i had come for a pregnancy test because up til now, it hasn't mattered too much to me if i got pregnant or not. but, seeing as though we're moving in the spring, i don't think i want to have a baby coming and more to worry about til i get settled and maybe get back into school. so when the pregnancy test came back negative, i got myself a perscription for birth control and called it a day. while he wrote the perscription, the doctor asked a few questions about my weight and why i'd gained so much in the spring....and mentioned that everything else like blood pressure looked really good. a quick slip of paper for a referral later, i was at the hospital getting cholesterol tests and sugar tests done as well as a test he specifically ordered up on thyroid hormone count. but all of this only after a discussion about what my new primary care physician had suggested. to my complete disgust, the woman had suggested gastric bypass surgery for me. to my disgust and my shock, i should say. she didn't offer a diet plan or a nutritionist...she barely even mentioned that my insurance covers weight watchers or something like it. she just flat out said that that was something that i should think about. i immediately refused the option as something i'd even consider, but she left it on the table for me, should i change my mind. here is where my disgust stems from: i know not one, but two women who have had that surgery and neither are women that i would have ever really considered to be active in a nutrition-regimine...a diet that didn't consist of some hollywood fad sort of thing like eating only grapefruit for a week or something equally unhealthy or ridiculous. neither are women that i have ever seen participate in an athletic activity, join a gym, or try to work the weight off. now i mean them no disrespect, but for all the weight that they've supposedly lost successfully, i say they've cheated. not only have they done so without so much as really working out or excercising, they've done it in a way that will forever alter their bodies...and not in all ways for the better. and yet we are told that we should revere t hem and be proud of how brave they are for having so much of their guts cut out and rerouted, we are to be so happy for them for all of the weight that just falls off of them in the same manner that a stomach cancer patient, for whom the procedure was originally intended, might lose weight. but again, i mean these women no disrespect. i suppose that my disgust comes with the fact that a doctor that, had i not known better, might have actually talked me into having such a surgery performed, offered this procedure without even so much as asking me too much about my diet or my excercise habits. without even asking what i do all day. without even trying other safer alternative methods or advice. without even suggesting that i try the diet of the people that get the surgery, which, in itself, would be enough to lose weight even without the surgery. instead, she was quick to suggest going under the knife and enjoying (if you can call it that) a quick fix solution that would leave me living in a spicy food carbonated beverage sugar free world with a feeling of fullness in my chest rather than my belly when i finished my one or two ounce meal. and thats just not for me. because i don't know how i could look at myself in the mirror afterwards and respect myself. because i don't know how i could convince anyone that i had done it for the right reasons rather than vanity. to convince that i had done it because i was concerned about the right thing...my health. and i don't know how i could lie to myself, either, to tell myself that i didn't do it so i could fit into a smaller size of pants...so my friends would quit picking on me...so i could sit on the couch and watch television and get thinner and thinner without working for it. and then, today, to find out that there could be other possibilities besides lifestyle choices that have led to my weight problem...like not having enough thyroid hormone or something...something that can be treated with other methods rather than cutting into my belly. when i asked for a woman doctor when i called to set up the appointment, i think i had expected a woman to understand what real women want...what healthy, intelligent women would want. i guess i had no way of knowing that even doctors will offer the quick fix solution when they get the chance. even doctors can be shallow. needless to say, i'll be calling the insurance company in the morning to find a new doctor. needless to say i won't stop looking until i find one that is willing to suggest healthy alternatives to ridiculous surgery quick fix cheater solutions. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- .what came before. - .what happened next. a diamond at the bottom of the drain - 20 october 2017 |
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