Prose and Kaa

This entry is part 6 in an ongoing series of semi-irregular posts detailing my frustration with Workers Compensation and the wonderful world of rotator cuff surgery. In case you haven't been keeping up: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 (YOU ARE HERE) | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10 | Part 11

You knew there was going to be another part, didn't you? I certainly did. Because why should anything be over when it's over?

So, first things first: Story time!

( This is long, but it does at least tangentially relate to the rest of the post. So you should probably click it. )

Why did I tell that story? It will soon become obvious.

So. Back in October, we left our intrepid hero (me) with physical therapy appointments, finally. After a long, drawn out battle. I had my first six PT appointments. They seemed to help. I had a lot of exercises to do, and they all hurt like heck. But I did them.

And after six visits, it still hurt like heck, but there was a bit more mobility. But Some Company had approved "eight to ten," so we still had a little wiggle room. So we scheduled six more, and I went back to my doctor to get another order for PT, which he gladly gave me.

Fast forward to the tenth PT visit. Melissa told me that Some Company had told them they weren't paying for any more visits after the sixth one, because they had only approved eight to ten. (Don't think about this too long. I did, and I lost 7 IQ points, permanently. But I still remember Gilligan's Island episodes. Can't ever get rid of something that doesn't matter. But I digress.)

I pointed out that they had said "eight to ten," and that six is not equal to either eight or ten, based on my many years of mathematics. I mean, I'm not a nuclear physicist, but this is fairly easy math. But apparently not for Some Company.

We cancelled my last two appointments until they could straighten everything out, and Melissa said they had also sent in my doctor's request for six more.

I spoke to Jane in HR about the whole thing, and she once again got everyone involved, and Some Company said that they would, indeed, pay for ten full visits. Once we explained the math to them. And I don't even mean that facetiously. Jane had to actually say, "You said 'eight to ten,' and he had six, after which you refused to pay for any more. Six is not 'eight to ten.' He's had four more, and by your own agreement, you should pay for them."

But still nothing about the approval for the remaining ones my doctor felt were needed.

Then I got The Letter. <ominous chord>

In The Letter <ominous chord>, I was informed that a doctor I have never met in my life reviewed my case and decided that since I "had returned to work at full duty" (which I never left, I might add), further therapy was "not medically necessary," and that they would not be covering the last two visits, nor would they be covering any subsequent visits. Further, my case was closed, and that was the end of it, as far as Some Company was concerned.

I . . . might have exploded. All over anyone in audible distance. I . . . might have used some of those words I didn't use in 8th grade. I might, indeed, have invented a few new ones. And I might have marched, letter in hand, to HR.

The next email from HR — after Jane talked with Some Company and others — was that Some Company would be paying for the final two visits. They I would request my PT for a referral to an orthopedist. And we would go from there.

So, I asked the PT for a referral.

Crickets. When I finally got hold of them again (another week went by because I thought maybe they were mailing it), they said they didn't do that, and that Melissa was no longer employed there, and who was I again? I would have to talk with my regular doctor.

I went a few rounds on the phone with his office staff, as well, and basically found out that I can't trust his office staff to give him messages.

Finally, in frustration, I contacted HR again and got them to send me a list of 'approved' orthopedists. I picked one and made my own damned appointment.

Which was yesterday at 3 pm.

The first question he asked me was, "Has your elbow been x-rayed?" I said it had not. He made some remark under his breath that I didn't quite catch, and then sent me to get an x-ray.

They x-rayed my elbow. And developed the film. And put it up on the light box.

And from all the way across the goddamned room, I could see . . . something.

He called me closer. "Do you see this little dark line right here?" He pointed. I said I did. "That is the sign of a healed compression fracture. That's why your elbow has been hurting."

He said that fractures like this "always heal" and that the treatment is basically to keep using it as normal so you get full movement once it heals. But it would continue to hurt for 3 to 12 months. I assured him that I had been using the arm as normally as I could given the pain. He said that was good.

Well, that's nice to know.

He then wanted to schedule me for an MRI of my shoulder. Which meant I had to call Some Woman at Some Company and get that approved. I called, and it went directly to her voice mail.

Much amaze. So expect. Wow. I didn't even bother leaving a message.

A few minutes later, as I was checking out and the receptionist was getting ready to call Some Woman themselves, my cell phone rang. It was Some Woman! OMG! First call I've ever gotten back! Alas, I was so shocked that she had called me that I didn't manage to answer. But we knew she was at her desk. So the receptionist ("Martha") called her and got on the phone with her!

The conversation, edited to remove the back-and-forth between me and the receptionist, went something like this:

Receptionist: Hi, this is Martha at Orthopedists R Us. I have one of your clients in my office, and we need to schedule an MRI for him. . . . [Kaa] . . . his right shoulder. . . . He made the appointment himself; there was no referral. . . . He says he got our name from a list of approved medical professionals from his workers comp representative at work. . . . Martha . . . Orthopedists R Us. . . . [Kaa] . . . his right shoulder . . .

And it went on. Then, Some Woman apparently said she'd have to call back and let them know where to send me for the MRI.

Martha said she would let me know if and when Some Woman called her back. [I should note here, for the record, that the doctor and the nurse and the receptionist were all scandalized when I told them about the sixty days Some Company made me wait before getting PT. Apparently, that is not normal. My mishandling of the initial doctor visit is probably what it all stems from. Had I gone to an orthopedist from the get-go . . . but hindsight is 20/20.]

That was yesterday at 4 pm.

Another part of Jane's email from work says this: "Katie (the My Company workers comp program manager) will oversee / ensure that Some Woman is facilitating the approval in a timely manner."

What that said to me was that someone is now watching over Some Company and Some Woman in particular, and that I may finally get some reaction from them on a timely enough basis to do something about.

What? Why are you laughing? That's not very polite.

This entry is part 2 in an ongoing series of semi-irregular posts detailing my frustration with Workers Compensation and the wonderful world of rotator cuff surgery: Part 1 | Part 2 (YOU ARE HERE) | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10 | Part 11

You may remember a post I made last month about how I injured myself in a fall at work. The doctor at the time told me that it was not broken, nor did I have any sort of rotator cuff injury, which were the two things I was most concerned about. I took Ibuprofen and basically went about my normal business, expecting my arm to get better.

Only it didn't.

I mean, it did, but not fully. By the 19th of August, nearly three weeks past the date I had fallen, I went back to my doctor and told him that it still hurt like hell to move my arm in certain ways <insert old joke "Doctor, it hurts when I do this." "Well, don't do that!" <laughter> here>, and that I was getting tired of not being able to use my dominant arm.

I must interject a "rest of the story" point or two, here. The first time I went to the doctor, I did not mention the term "worker's comp" or "on the job injury" or anything of that sort. I fell in the parking lot, it was no one's fault, and, hey, he said it would get better, right? I told my boss about the fall, and he duly reported it to HR. Who reported it to someone else, and they told two friends, and they told two friends, and eventually it made it up to the Office of Homeland Security. Or something. I am fairly sure the NSA was involved. I don't really understand how the whole system works (clearly), but the upshot is I got a call from Some Woman at Some Company who asked me a bunch of questions, expressed skepticism about workers comp paying if the incident took place in the parking lot (unless my company owns the parking lot . . .). She would call me back, she said, if she needed any more information. That was on, like, the same day I posted that earlier post.

So anyhoo, on my second visit on the 19th, my doctor referred me to a physical therapist down the road from his office. I called the number and made an appointment for the next day.

I went early on the morning of the 20th of August and within 5 minutes of having me perform various motions with my joints, the doctor took me over to a large anatomical chart showing the bones, muscles, and tendons of the arm and shoulder, and showed me exactly what I had done to myself. The gist is: tendons. I did bad things to the tendons that hold my upper arm in place so that it doesn't scrape painfully against my shoulder blade when I move it. The whole 'jamming' thing, probably.

He gave me some exercises to do every two hours, some to do twice per day, and sent me on my way.

On my way out, I paused at the desk to schedule my next appointment.

And that is when my tape turned crimson.( Click to read the rest. )

I came to an overdue realization this weekend:

I may be from Eutaw—it is my hometown, and I have many fond memories of it—but I am not of Eutaw. Thomas Wolfe was right: you can't go home again.

There are many reasons why I would never consider moving back to Eutaw unless some drastic life-altering event required it. Among them are the isolation, the lack of intellectual stimulation, the fact that the streets roll up at 6 pm, the total lack of any computer-related jobs in the area, and the complete absence of any of my friends. To do anything remotely entertaining requires a drive of at least 35 minutes to one of several neighboring cities with more to offer: Tuscaloosa/Northport, Demopolis, or Meridian, Mississippi. To some of the smaller communities around Eutaw, Moundville and Greensboro would probably also fit the bill. (Greensboro has a Mexican restaurant! Owned and run by real Mexicans!). The nearest decent airport is a good two hours' drive away. As for me, I found myself having to go to Birmingham, sometimes, because even Tuscaloosa didn't cut it. I guess it's only natural that I ended up in the largest city in the southeast.

I could bear all of that, I suppose. If I had to. There's NetFlix and IM and TIM and LJ and road trips. There's books and podcasts and satellite TV. But there's one thing I cannot bear about the town or its people: the casual, institutionalized racism. It's omnipresent. It's omnipotent. It's omni-malevolent.

The whites hate the blacks, the Jews, the Mexicans, and the Arabs (anyone who is dark-skinned who isn't either black or Mexican is, by default, an "AY-rab"). The blacks hate the whites, the Mexicans, the Arabs, and probably the Jews, although I doubt there are any left in Eutaw to be hated. For all I know, the Arabs, Jews and Mexicans hate the whites, blacks, and each other with equal fervor. I even hear tell that <looks around nervously, lowers voice> there's Asians in town. I doubt they've been around long enough to harbor any full-on hatreds. But it's only a matter of time. The town is sick, and the disease is racism.¹ And it's contagious.

I'm sure it's the same all over. Being a white male, it's easy for me to say I never noticed it and not be lying. I was born white, male, and middle class, then sheltered from the worst aspects of life outside my limited scope. I should thank my mother for this.

When I went off to college (the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa), I had roommates (serially, not all at once) of wildly divergent backgrounds. Dwight was a good-ole country boy who went to bed at 9 pm and got up at the ass-crack of dawn. Robert was a jazz-loving, pipe-smoking big-city (NOLA) radio DJ who seemed totally bemused by me, but loved introducing me to weird stuff like Monty Python, the B-52s, George Carlin, and his own twisted sense of humor. Albert was an astounding artist who could draw anything, but who was majoring in Electrical Engineering. Jerry was an unbelievable asshole who spoke to me exactly twice in a three-week period before I begged Housing to move me to another room. Butch was in the ROTC and the military way of life flavored his every action. After that, I got a private room, but by then I was friends with a wide variety of people who broadened my horizons. Heck, I was good friends with a Puerto Rican, the student rabbi at the B'nai B'rith Hillel house, several black people, and yankees! <insert shocked, scandalized gasps of Eutaw residents here> Looking back on it, I think that by the time I was a Junior, there's no way I could have ever gone back to Eutaw for any length of time.

To show you how naïve I really was at the time, there was a boring weekend where my friends and I had absolutely nothing to do, so I offered to take them to Eutaw and show them my hometown. I had a car; they didn't. Three of them took me up on the offer. One of them was my friend Cedric, who is black. So we set off down the Interstate talking amongst ourselves. Three white boys and one black boy. When we drove into town, we drove in on the "black side" of town. I drove around a while and showed them the town, and then eventually stopped at the house of my best friend from high school, and they all met her and her parents. I think we ended up over at my mother's house for a while, and then went back to Tuscaloosa. I noticed that Cedric was very quiet, and I asked him what was up. He then told me about the looks he'd seen directed at him on the "black side" of town for being in the car with us, and said he felt extremely uncomfortable meeting my friends and family. While none of them gave him any reason to be self-conscious, he said that his hometown was very similar to Eutaw, only he grew up on the "black side" of town. I was stunned. I think that might have been the first time I realized that there is no such thing as "reverse racism"; racism is just racism, no matter who's hating whom.

That being said, Granddaddy has always used the n-word...let me pause for a moment.

I use the phrase "n-word" not because I'm afraid of the word "nigger" or want to "give it power" or whatever. I had heard it used all through my childhood and I knew it was a "bad word" that I was told never to use, even if I heard other kids or adults use it. It wasn't until I had friends at whom it was aimed with such venom and hatred that I realized just how nasty it is when spoken by people in whom hatred is practically genetic. To this day, I don't use it except in reference to the word itself, as above, or when quoting other people. So, back to the point I was about to make.

Granddaddy has always used the n-word casually. Not like you or I would use the words "table" or "Buick," but the way we might use the words "pedophile" or "leper." He means it in the worst possible way it can be meant. And if he's especially riled up, he'll precede it with "damned." As in, "That's just like a damned nigger." It always really bothered me, but it started to seriously grate on me when he directed it at friends of mine. I had my friend Rodney help me move a large couch, and Granddaddy was there because he's the one who brought it to me in his truck. Granddaddy was as nice as he could be to Rodney, and I heaved a heavy sigh that he hadn't said something really embarrassing. I'd been worrying about it for days.

Later, he was trying to remember Rodney's name, and his way of asking was, "Who was that nigger that helped you move your couch?" That may have been the first time I ever truly realized just how...disgusting the n-word can be. Yes, it's "just a word," but so is "cunt."

In every instance when I've been thrown back into socializing with Eutaw folks, I've immediately gotten uncomfortable, because it's not long at all until the racism starts flowing. Like bile. Family reunions, Thanksgiving, Christmas, funerals (yes, funerals), high school reunions...even when former high-school classmates would visit me at my first apartment in Tuscaloosa while I was a grad student. They knew I didn't drink, so they'd bring beer...and racism. It wore me down to the point that I quit socializing with them at all.

The town is > 66% black, but the government was mostly all white until just a few years back. It was a world-class scandal when Eutaw had its first black mayor and an all-black council. You'd have thought Armageddon was nigh and the four horsemen were galloping hard towards Eutaw, swords drawn.

It's probably a good thing that none of the white population have really given much thought to how unlikely it is that Jesus (and Mary, of course) was Caucasian. Wanna see a riot in the streets? Suggest to the Eutaw white churches that Jesus—if he existed at all—would have had dark skin and been Jewish. Sadly, I'm dead serious.

Eutaw has moved on in some ways, though. The all-white school is now a religious school, so they take anyone of any race...as long as they're Christian. The all-white pool closed, so the only public pool is now the one on the "black side" of town. The Junior Food/7-11/Jiffy Mart/whatever on the "white side" of town is now run by one of the town's Arabs. The once all-white neighborhoods on the "white side" of town now reflect the 70/30 race distribution, and at least some residents (even Granddaddy) realize that a good neighbor is not defined by the color of their skin, but the contents of their character (to paraphrase Dr. King).

But, as I said before, Eutaw is sick. It's so consumed by hatred that it makes me sick. And it makes me realize that while home is where the heart is, my heart is no longer at home in Eutaw.

And this makes me sad for some reason I can't put my finger on. It's like...my childhood home burned down and I lost all my mementos.

The sickness has been there for years—probably decades. But it's finally taking its toll. Crime is rampant to the point where people can't do yard-work without being armed. There was a gang fight in the public high school the other day and two high school students were sent to the hospital with razor wounds. A few days before that, two girls got into a fight in the cafeteria and one stabbed the other with a steak knife. There are drug raids, dog fighting, illegal hunting, car thefts, murders....

Eutaw is a town of around 1900 people. The median age is around 43. Young people leave the town as soon as they are able, and they don't come back. The ones that stay face a life of poverty (the median household income is around $23,000/year), and at least some of them turn to crime as a way out.

Unfortunately, I don't think Eutaw can be healed. The sickness is a cancer, and it's metastasized into every organ. The only thing left to do, now, is make the patient comfortable while waiting for the inevitable.

---

1. Lest you get the impression that all the hatred is "simply" racial, the Arab guy (we think he's from Yemen) who owns/runs the 7-11 tried to buy a house for himself and his family, whom he's trying to bring over from their home country. He really liked one house and tried to put an offer down and was told that the owner didn't want to sell it to him because it needed to be sold to a Christian. Yep. Welcome to Eutaw, Ahmed (his actual name, not a slur). Now leave.