It's A Mad Mad Mad Medical World

One thing I'll never miss about Earth is having to go to the hospital. Going to the doctor wasn't so bad when I was a kid because you actually got to see the doctor. Nowadays, he or she roller skates from treatment room to treatment room while medical underlings like physicians assistants and nurse practitioners and registered nurses and licensed practical nurses and blood technicians poke and prod and siphon you. That way they can all get a piece of the insurance pie before Mr. or Ms. God him or herself graces you with their presence. And, invariably, their presence is to nod and nod and write you a kickback-infested prescription and then bill you for an extended office visit which your medical insurance will only pay half of.

Then if you have to go to the hospital you'd better hope it's not in an ambulance. If it is an ambulance, bigass EMTs will knock over your lamps and end tables trying to get you on the gurney while a backup paramedic watches and chews gum. Your bill will be big enough that you'll have to take out a loan in order to pay it. Then, when you get to the hospital, at least a dozen medical professionals, including at least six kinds of doctors, will see you for one minute each and then bill you for consultations.

If they admit you, you will be growled at by middle-aged female nurses who hate their ex-husbands almost as much as they hate you and hate taking care of you, even though they're getting paid about twenty dollars per hour more than their sorry asses are worth. If you're lucky, you'll get a dedicated twenty-something female nurse who still believes in her oath and her duty to care for you, no matter who you are. If you're still unlucky, you'll get a male nurse who hates to clean up after you or a young redneck female nurse who bitches and moans about her kids and her sorry home life all day long.

If your luck has totally run out then you'll be assigned a doctor who does not speak English and who hates white people but who loves the grant money that the hospital got to pay his or her white-hating salary. He or she will mistreat your family visitors who are, contrary to the stereotype labels they were instantly given at the uppity hospital, without a racist bone in their bodies. They will be stereotyped and hated because the racist Middle Eastern or Indian or Pakistani male or female doctor they stuck you with thinks only white people can be hateful and therefore hates all of you from day one, before any of you even get the opportunity to speak.

If you're lucky enough to get discharged before two tor three months have gone by and your hospital bill is then so big that you'll have to take out a second mortgage on your home to pay half of it, you'll probably still have diarrhea from the Clostridium difficile infection (C. diff) you picked up from unclean medical professionals' hands during your hospital stay. They will hide this fact from you as long as you're in their care, so you won't bolt, scream or sue.

Then, if you are completely luckless, you'll be visited by a home health nurse who will botch your home blood tests and call an ambulance for you, which you will not be able to afford again. Or, bad luck still in place, you'll be visited by a referred physical therapist who will insult you and your family members for having signs in your driveway warning off trespassing ATVs. Like it's any of his goddamn business.

Man, I wouldn't go back to Earth for all the money in the world. Sooner or later, some medical professional would just bill me for all of it.

Bottom Feeders

There are lots of things I don't miss about living on Earth besides the dozen things I listed the last time I addressed this issue. I need to get two of them off my chest right now, before I start scouring that new canal I found for Martian mushrooms, algae and some ancient salt. If I'm lucky, I'll run into another homeless bum like me who was abducted from Earth by those bad-boy Grays and dumped here because his blood's Muscatel level was also a wee bit too high for their DNA experiments. Pricks. With any real luck, I'll stumble over a sleeping bum who was abducted from Earth in an alley outside of a fast-food joint or a convenience store and whose pockets may contain a few leftover fries or a half-eaten 5th Avenue.

Just thinking about food — even day-old junk food that belongs to someone else — makes me forget why I'm at the old Commodore 64 this evening, blogging away. Lately, I've been surviving on nothing but pilfered Zagnut candy bars and warm Strawberry Quik, well past the expiration date, and you can't really call that "brain food".

Oh, yeah. Bottom feeders. That's what I hated most about Earth before I got snatched by a blue beam of light from the 1965 Rambler Ambassador sedan I called "home" at the time. Go ahead and laugh but, in 1965, the Rambler Ambassador was considered the Cadillac of blue-collar-worker cars, especially by people who did a lot of camping. That baby would haul anything and you'd never even know it. Of course, I was living in it in an alley near Hollywood & Vine in 2008, so it had seen its better days.

Shit. Here I go again. Bottom feeders. I mean those crooks who run insurance companies from places like Pittsburgh and who can't do business the regular way so they pretend to hook up with major credit card companies who are offering free life insurance to their cardholders. For a day or so. Then, if you don't call this toll free number in the fine print on the back of the letter they sent you, your $3,000 worth of free life insurance provided by your bottom-feeding major credit card company becomes a $200,000 policy with quarterly premium payments coming out of your credit card. If you don't call that goddamn toll-free number. So, if you don't do anything, they attach themselves to your credit card like leeches. If you do call them (meaning, if you saw that hidden clause in the fine print on the back of the bottom feeder's letter) they don't understand why you're upset. When you call your major credit card company, they act like they don't know what you're talking about. Right, and I've never heard of a Hershey Bar or "Buyer Beware", either. Crooks.

The insurance company bottom feeders are even worse than the fake car warranty people from New Mexico who send you what looks like an official warning of some kind that makes you fear that if you so much as dare to let your vehicle's warranty expire, the President of the United States, himself, will horsewhip you. That didn't bother me quite as much as the life insurance bottom feeders because the Rambler I was living in wasn't really mine anyway and I'm sure that its warranty expired about forty years ago.

How did I get mail delivered to a 1965 Rambler Ambassador abandoned in an alley in Hollywood, you might ask? Well, I can thank the 9-1-1 emergency number people for that. Before 9-1-1 came along, my "home" would have been just a rusty, old, abandoned vehicle. But, after 9-1-1 got a choke hold on L.A. and renamed all the goddamn streets and reassigned all the goddamn house numbers to suit their Napoleonic needs, they changed that 1965 Rambler Ambassador to 1965 Ambassador Way. Go figure. Naturally, the Post Office, now called the USPS, had no choice but to deliver mail there.

And, you might also want to know how a homeless bum like me had a major credit card. Well, I wasn't always a homeless bum. At one time I was a consumer, the Cadillac of citizens. And as long as I scraped together the minimum monthly payment, I got to keep my card.

By the way, if I ever get dumped back on Earth by the goddamn Grays, I'd probably still want to visit New Mexico, especially Roswell and White Sands. Those places hold a certain fascination for me. But I wouldn't go to Pittsburgh to take a shit.