One Friday early in January was a great day. I woke up still feeling lousy, and had to call my boss to let her know I might not be able to work the very next day. (That was not the great part.) She was not pleased and said to call my doctor. I told her I didn’t have one (since I had just gotten new insurance for the third year in a row), and she said to get one, and recommended choosing a primary care provider who works at our integrative health center. I used to have a co-worker whose PCP was at this place. He really liked her, but when I looked her up recently, she was not listed.
I called the integrative health center to try to find someone else and learned that the person my co-worker liked is still there. She’s a nurse practitioner, not a doctor. At first I was pleased, but then I hesitated. Since I’m getting old, maybe it would be better to have an internal medicine doctor as my PCP. I described my dilemma to the receptionist, who I was sure was going to say, “Don’t know what to tell you, ma’am,” but instead she said that this nurse practitioner is trained in gerontology. Sold!
Next I called my longtime ob/gyn to see if she takes this new insurance of mine. She does!
Then I called the advice nurse, who, after hearing about my symptoms, told me to go to urgent care or the ED. I walked over to urgent care, a brand-new, pleasant place, and saw two very nice practitioners, and was handed a wad of prescriptions. I walked to Walgreens to have them filled, where my new insurance saved me $131.65! (I paid about $40, instead of $170 or so.)
At home, I went to update my document on cold procedures with this exciting case study and was reminded that there is no drug that will cure a cold, so you may as well treat the symptoms.
It is a superstition of mine that you should do, right around the time the new year starts, what you want there to be a lot of in the coming year. For that reason, I volunteered to work on New Year’s Day in 2018, because I wanted to do a lot of chaplaining in 2018. I was accordingly scheduled to work on both New Year’s Eve, 2018, and New Year’s Day, 2019, but did neither, because I was sick, so I hope 2019 isn’t full of being sick.
After I went to urgent care and took the various things the physician assistant there prescribed—cough syrup with codeine, cough pills, and albuterol via an inhaler—I had a wonderful night’s sleep. From now on, when I get a cold, I plan to go to urgent care right away, since treating cold symptoms may make all the difference when it comes to getting a good night’s sleep.
The fact that this cold lasted for so long made me worry that my immune system must be shot and that cancer is right around the corner, so I was relieved when I finally returned to work and encountered a co-worker who is 20 years younger than I am and who was still trying to get over a similar cold; she said it had lasted way longer than her colds usually do.
An unrelated but perhaps interesting snippet: I did some required online training that day and learned that 25 percent of people who die by suicide were seen in the ER for non-psych reasons in the 12 months prior to their death.
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