Kaiser

Yesterday arriving for my visit at Kaiser Permanente, I logged in at the arrival-for-your-visit machine that looks like an ATM but isn't.
After I inserted my Kaiser Permanente medical card, (which is like a credit card) I found my appointment, filled in all the details, and then the machine asked me a series of check box questions related to my medical issue.

'Did your injury occur at work?'
This made us laugh, trying to think of how I could injure my vagina at work.
1. I dropped a stamp pad in my lap and broke my cervix.
2. I was drinking a coffee that had a migrating fibroid in it.
3. I was turning the printer on when a surge of electricity gave me bacterial vaginosis.

Next question up was- 'Did your injury occur due to a slip or a fall at work?'
 1. I fell over my spirograph set and broke my womb.
2. While reaching for a pencil I slipped on my eraser and caught my uterus on the edge of my drawing table.
3. I was tattooing a client when I mistook my vagina for an ink pot.

There is so much humour to be found in the constant, ceaseless, relentless yet somewhat sad automated world in which we now find ourselves.

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This drawing is called Hold That Goal-slow your pace, baby.
I was recently listening to a thing about a thing where you do nothing, or want for nothing or...I can't remember now.
Which started me thinking that instead of getting all f++ked up in the head by trying really hard to make 'things happen', a better way is to just hold the goal, and quietly carry on.

While searching for what that Chinese thing actually is, I came across this, which made me smile a lot.

It's my VAGINA.

After the aquarium, Carol and I are sitting in a booth in the middle of a diner that advertises 'Baked Apple Pancakes' as their speciality, and I am on the phone to my health care provider trying to make an appointment to see a doctor.

The woman on the other end of the phone is asking me what my problem is and, reluctantly I say, while looking down at my plate of three inch thick pancakes -'It's my vagina,'

But 'Vagina' won't satisfy her, it seems.
The woman who takes appointments for Kaiser Permanente wants me to go into more detail about my vagina.

So I tuck the phone under my ear and try to open a tiny packet of strawberry jam for my pancake while telling this woman, who isn't a doctor, who isn't a nurse, who has all my personal details, who knows where I live, who has my wife's credit card on file and who knows my phone number ALL about the issues of a vagina she has never seen and that she will never come into contact with, because she is not my doctor.
She is not even a nurse.
She is an APPOINTMENT MAKER.
She most likely takes appointment after appointment for the busted vaginas and the fungal infections and the anal issues of people she will never meet, of people who probably do not want to go into that much detail about personal medical issues with a disinterested stranger over the phone.

She is an appointment maker, in a call center, and it's the USA so she is probably under-paid, and she is now more familiar with my vaginal issues than even my best friend is, than even my wife is, than even my DOCTOR is.

But not more familiar than poor Carol, who sits opposite me, quietly eating her omelette, drinking her diet Coke and listening to a detailed chronological medical history of my vagina.

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This drawing is called 'Fish Like Life-give fish your best'.
Carol and I visited the Birch Aquarium and marvelled at the fish.
There is something called a sea dragon that looks like a cross between a sea horse and a plant.
Fish are just really trying to get along, like the rest of us.
It seems utterly selfish to eat them if you don't have to, or dump garbage in their home because we don't want it around us.