Damn Ouch

May 18, 2022

Well it took three doctors and two appointments and $500 but I finally got some oral antibiotics. Very cool that I had to wait for my eye to become completely swollen shut before I could get medicine, and now I’ve got preseptal cellulitis and I’m told I gotta go to the ER if it gets any worse at all.

I have this little routine I do in my head where I worry about losing my eye, then I start thinking about how cool I’d look with an eye-patch and feel a bit better, and then I land on the most likely outcome which is that the oral antibiotics that I knew I needed a week ago will likely do the job and I’ll potentially have some residual damage to my eyesight. Then I get pretty mad.

I don’t understand how there’s big debates about the best way to do things; I guess you know, “issues,” (like healthcare or abortion, etc) and we somehow end up with the worst combination of ideas. Nobody gets what they want and we end up with some dog shit middle ground that only benefits a very small group of people. Is that just some kind of inefficiency or is democracy just a bad idea?

I don’t fucking get it.

I had to pay for a telemedicine appointment, they refused to prescribe me the thing I need. Then I had to pay to see a specialist. They didn’t listen to me or even really examine me, just gave me some ointment. I had to pay to go back and point out that they did not diagnose the issue correctly. Now I have to pay for the medicine, and now there’s the possibility that I still gotta go to the fucking ER even though I tried to take care of things early. I gotta pay for all this shit and tell these motherfuckers what I need and even then this still would have cost me a lot more if I had health insurance. So I’m on my own and have to look out for myself. But if that’s the case then deregulate the whole fucking thing and let me call in my own prescription to the pharmacy.

What’s the worst that could happen? People just call in their own prescription for opiates? Yeah probably. So what? They might overdose and die? And then what, they lose a customer? It’s not like they actually give a shit about anyone. I don’t get it.

I know I’m being dramatic with regards to my own personal circumstance right now, it’s just an eye and 500 bucks is not a big deal and I’ve been very lucky in my life that I can cover the costs of these things. But I was already mad about healthcare before I had a lemon sticking out of my eye socket and it’s just like this all the time. Every single day people have to deal with this and it’s just absurd how fucked up this system is.

I think about that movie John Q, which, I don’t remember when it came out exactly but I’m pretty sure it was the years leading up to the ACA when healthcare costs were going through the roof and people were desperate. And the whole movie is about a father who does what he needs to do to get a heart transplant for his son. And it turns into this Dog Day Afternoon thing where the public sides with John. And the cops and especially the health insurance companies are the bad guys.

But what I don’t like about the movie is that it’s gotta be about a father trying to save his son, with a heart transplant no less which is like, yeah of course that shit’s going to be expensive. Like they have to make John Q a man with a more noble cause than just the everyday desperation that people experience. You could make that same movie and it’s just a guy who works at CarMax and he made the mistake of going to the emergency room to get stitches. If that guy went into the ER with a gun in real life and demanded 5 dollars worth of thread to get his leg closed up without being charged thousands and thousands and winding up in debt I’d be on his side and a lot of other people would as well. John Q is like making a movie about a woman who kills her rapist but it’s like, “oh but the rapist like REALLY deserved, it. This wasn’t just your day to day normal rape that everyone can and should put up with.”

They can’t do that though, because that would just be a mean-spirited movie. Critics would hate it. They’d say John CarMax is a bad person and its a bad person movie for bad people. Nevermind that movies aren’t supposed to be moral instruction and criticism isn’t supposed to be ethical hall-monitoring, but even in their dumb good-guy bad-guy world they’d be wrong about John CarMax. I know it’s a hypothetical movie, but look at the way retards talk about Falling Down. Which, by the way, is not a very good movie (mainly because the entire thing is built around repeated My Fair Lady puns), but the problem with it isn’t that the protagonist is a cranky white man. For whatever reason it gets written off as some kind of Family Court guy MRA revenge fantasy. Just because its about some white egghead that’s mad about traffic and false advertising. The protagonist isn’t enough of a noble victim and the problems he’s dealing with aren’t serious enough injustices, so it’s invalid and Actually Bad.

The closest thing we’ve ever had to a real John CarMax (I haven’t checked) is the Killdozer. That was just a regular guy trying his best to run a muffler shop and he followed the rules and played along and City Hall pulled some zoning bullshit and literally fucked around and found out. That’s real life. Everyone cheers for Killdozer.

But if Killdozer had just been a movie? Then it would be an exploration of toxic male masculinity or white rage or some moronic idea like that, because Killdozer wouldn’t be noble or heroic enough to express the kind of quotidian frustration everyone is subjected to.

I’m too stupid to understand why that frustration can’t be reflected in media. I think there’s an obvious thing there about dividing people based on identity, etc etc but I think it’s more than that. I think there’s a deeper psychological cause that doesn’t necessarily have to do with some top down form of control wherein the stories we are told to believe and accept are only the ones where a noble victim gets noble justice.

Either way my head hurts and I can barely see the screen and I’m very dizzy. It just frustrates me to know this all could have been avoided if I could just gotten what I needed when I needed it, or barring that, not touched my eye after going to the bathroom. I guess when u consider it that way, maybe it is just my fault after all.