Sick

This year, like last year, I went to the Outer Banks for Thanksgiving. There was a lot of work involved in packing up everything we needed for the week long stay, but being a block from the beach, at anytime of the year, was worth it. I was also in walking distance from a library and added another library card to my collection (I have one from Currituck County, NC and Beaufort County, NC).

Unfortunately, I caught a cold while I was there. I’ve spent the past two days in bed with headache, congestion and dizziness. I’m not happy about it since it’s so close to Christmas and I haven’t even gotten my tree yet. Not to mention I wanted to finish working two proposals I want to send out and a gift I'm knitting. Being sick severely decreases my productivity.

So today, I decided that I’d suffered enough and it was time to make a doctor’s appointment. I don’t even know why I bothered. Of course I didn’t get one. It is so hard getting an appointment at Tricare, the military health provider. I don’t understand how a clinic can have no open appointments for days at a time. The tech gave me three options. Call again on another day (so you can tell me that there are no appointments? No thanks.) Go to the emergency room (and sit for eight hours? I’ll pass). Or the worse of the three options: Urgent care. Ha!

Urgent Care is clinics outside the Tricare system available when there’re no more appointments. And if you use Urgent Care, there is an co-pay that the techs at the appointment line don’t tell you about. The biggest problem with going to Urgent Care is you have to turn around and go to Tricare anyways.

For instance, my right thumb has been giving me problems for a while and when it got particularly painful, I took went to an Urgent Care clinic because there were no appointments with my regular doctor. Boy, that was a waste of time. They examined my thumb and told me that I needed x-rays and a possibly a cortisone shot, but they couldn’t do either. They told me that I would have to make an appointment with my regular doctor. They recommendation was to get voice recognition software so I didn’t have to type as much as I did. Yeah, right.

The military has been in the news a lot because of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. As a military spouse, I think that’s a joke. There are so many quality of life issues that need to be addressed, that need a public exposure. Like how about someone make sure that military families get the care they need, especially since we can’t afford any other health insurance?

So if you don’t ask me when I’m going to get a doctor’s appointment, I won’t tell you that I have no idea.