Rant #3,165: Truckin'

Yippee!

It’s Friday, so the weekend is coming up once we get done with today.

Yucky!

I have to get my allergy shots today, which means that I have to travel miles and miles to get them, rather than get them pretty much right around the corner like I used to be able to get them before I was forced into retirement and had to take a different health plan than what I had when I was working.

Yes, one thing does lead to another, and my five-mile (maybe that much) trip has now become a 40-mile (at least) one, all because the doctor who oversees my allergy shots—who I saw for about 45 seconds a few weeks ago, the first time I met with him in several years—does not carry my health insurance, and evidently has no intention to do so.

I thought things were supposed to be easier in retirement … but for me, everything has gotten more difficult, and I do mean much more difficult, and even getting allergy shots is now a chore.

I have been getting these shots regularly, without any even brief respite, since I was 15 years old, so I have been getting them without a measurable break for the past 51 years.

The funny thing is that I first started getting them during the summer of 1972, so today might just be my 51st anniversary—to the day--of getting them.

I should have known that over the years, this was not going to be an easy process.

Right aft the get-go, I had to take the old “staple gun” test to determine that I needed the shots, and that old test left my arms in such bad shape that during the summer of 1972, I was probably the only person in New York State who wore long sleeves to cover the damage all throughout the months of July, August and probably into September.

My arms—and in particular, my left arm—looked like I had been injecting heroin, and it was embarrassing.

And then when that was over and it was determined that I needed the shots, I went to my regular doctor back in Queens—a doctor we had used since I was a toddler--and he told me that it was silly to cone all the way back to Queens to get my monthly shots—since my father was working, my mother didn’t drive and it was taking two or three buses one way to get to his office—and that I should find a doctor nearer to where I now lived to get my monthly doses.

So based on what he said, right down the road from us, my mother found a kindly, old allergy doctor—“old” to me back then was maybe in your 50s—and he administered my second set of shots, and I subsequently made an appointment to come back the nest month for two more shots—

The problem was that during the month between my second set of shots and what were to be my third set of shots, this kindly, old doctor decided that he had had enough with life, and killed himself.

I hope that I was not the cause of his fatal decision.

Then we found another doctor, who became my regular GP, to give me my monthly shots, and he gave them to me for literally decades.

His practice was right down the block, and in my pre-driving days, I either walked there or rode my cycle there.

This doctor had absolutely no beside demeanor, but he was an excellent doctor, and I used him until he abruptly retired in the 1990s or early 200s or so.

Then I used the doctor who bought his practice, a younger doctor with a young family in tow.

Coming here from India, he was a nice guy, had great bedside manner, and even used his wife as his receptionist, so it was a real family thing, and my son and wife later used him, too.

Then a few years into his time there, he started to act very oddly, painting the walls of the office with garish colors and talking about types of medicine that I had never heard of, and berating me with all his findings and calculations and all of this information on a regular basis.

It got so bad that I swore I was going to find another doctor, and while in the waiting room, I found that I was not the only one uncomfortable with his actions, and that a lot of his patients felt the same way that I did.

And then, one morning, the top story on all the news shows was that a doctor on Long Island had been arrested for giving our various medicines—opioids—to underage patients, with the story becoming even larger when it was divulged that he was the official doctor for the sports teams of nearby Massapequa High School, and had been doling out these drugs—including oxycodon—to student athletes for years.

He was caught red-handed on a video doing just that to a young-looking, undercover police officer posing as a teen looking for a quick fix, and he was summarily arrested.

It later came out that he was abusing these drugs himself, so it now all added up.

He was sent to jail, served his time—I found out that his license to practice medicine was curiously never revoked during his time in prison, as I could not get my medical records from him, or so the then-Nassau County District Attorney Office told me--and he was never heard from again in these parts.

I am pretty sure that he went back to India, with or without his family.

That led me to find another place to dispense the shots to me, and I found a medical office just about 2.5 miles away from my house, where a nurse would give me my shots each month.

This was the office which I used until the debacle of retirement forced me to drive nearly to the Queens border to get these monthly shots.

What a long, strange trip it has been, and continues to be as I will soon enter my fourth year—third official year—of forced retirement, or semi-retirement.

I will be getting my shots later this morning, but what I really need is a shot of something else to fully get my arms around all of this, and try to make sense of a senseless situation …

And to try to understand the bigger picture, of why my retirement has been such a compete and total disaster, and with absolutely no light at the end of the abyss.

Have a great weekend, and I will speak to you again on Monday.