October 20, 2003

I wrote a ton of update yesterday but didn’t get a chance to post all of it. So if you are reading this before Thursday or so, be sure to go back and read October 19th later because it will be much longer. I sat in the living room all day yesterday with Min after she hurt her back and all of the updates that I wrote are on my laptop and I don’t have the energy today to transfer them over to post them. I am going to start carrying around the latest copy of the site on a USB memory stick so that it is easier for me to work on wherever I may be at the time.

Dominica’s back is still really bad this morning. She is in a lot of pain and very upset. We made an appointment to see the doctor today. We weren’t able to schedule her in until this afternoon so she will have to deal with the pain for a bit of the day before we can go. She is going to use my doctor in Batavia since she doesn’t have one out here yet.

Tomorrow is the Microsoft Office 2003 Launch Event. Should be very exciting. We don’t think that Min is going to be able to go, though, because of her back. It is really too bad because she was really looking forward to going. It is an extra shame because they are giving out Microsoft Office Professional 2003 to everyone who goes to the show so she is really going to miss out.

ChoiceOne finally came this morning and installed our SDSL line that we have been waiting for all of this time. It turns out that the line is really ADSL that acts like SDSL but that is ok, it isn’t really a big deal. The important thing is that the line is finally in place. I was so busy today that I wasn’t even able to try the line at all. Maybe I will be able to get to it tomorrow if I am lucky. I have a ton of things to do and I have been having a terrible time trying to catch up. There has just been so much going on recently that I am just falling farther and farther behind. I didn’t even get a chance to really eat today before I had to take Min out to Batavia to see the doctor.

Min laid in the back seat of the car on the way to Batavia. She can’t sit up at all from the pain in her back. We finally got out to the doctor’s office and I left Min in the car so that I could go check her in since they don’t have anywhere for you to lie down in the waiting room and she can’t stand or sit. The doctor said that if she couldn’t sit in the waiting room then she needed to go straight to the emergency room at United Memorial Hospital. Luckily, the hospital is in the same parking lot as the doctor’s office so that wasn’t too hard to do. We drove over and I got her into the emergency room. The staff there were plain mean. They wouldn’t do anything to help us. There was no where for Min to go because all they had were seats that she couldn’t sit in. They ignored us as much as they could and told us that beds were only for people who had hurt their backs falling and all other back injuries had to walk. When we told them she couldn’t walk or sit they brought a wheel chair out and laughed at us. The whole waiting room was furious and talking about how mean the nurses where there. Min kneeled against one of the chairs and leaned her head on the wall while I got her all checked in. Then they made her stand to check her vitals while she cried from the pain. The nurse was really mean about it. Then they made her just stand in the middle of the waiting area for about fifteen minutes while they did whatever it is they do. No one knows what they do in the emergency room that takes more than ten seconds. It seems like you could just walk in and be treated. But, of course, non of them or computer literate (or likely literate at all) so that probably plays a big role in it. That is probably also why they can never figure out which patients are which. Finally a nurse came out to take Min back somewhere and I made sure that they would have a bed for her when we got there before I let them take her. When we finally got there they made me leave (I can only assume so that there is no one there to see what is really done – patients in pain are much more apt to just let the doctors and nurses do whatever they want if there is no one there to support them.) So I went back out and waited in the waiting room for a few hours.

Eventually a nurse decided that I could go back to see Min. They hadn’t really done anything. But at least she was on a bed so it wasn’t so bad. But some jerk had come along and raised her head up so her back hurt again and just took off and no nurses would stop by to check on her and they didn’t give them any way to call her. She couldn’t call out for a nurse because the ER nurses had made her sit and stand for so long that she was so weak that she couldn’t do anything. I couldn’t get a nurse easily either so I put the bed down myself and she was a bit better after that. They gave her some pain killer in her butt but that was about all that they did for her while we were there. The doctor gave her a prescription for an anti-biotic for something that we hadn’t come to the emergency room for and totally ignored her back and just left. But they had drugged her up so we couldn’t do anything more at that point and all we wanted to do was to get out of that place. So all of that pain and torture and they managed to not even look at her, basically. It was a total waste of time and the pain hadn’t been such a big deal until we went to the hospital. I was, and am, furious. This is the same hospital that refused to admit me in 1998 when I had appendicitis and then my appendix burst. That is United Memorial Hospital in Batavia, NY (formally Genesee Hospital) for anyone who is ever considering going there. I know that lots of hospitals treat their patients horribly and that it has become status quo to do so but this hospital has really stood out as a really terrible place to go. Everyone we dealt with was rude, ignorant and incompetent. I hope that the insurance company has a talk with them about charging for services that we didn’t even go in there for and doing nothing for the reason that we were there and only succeeding at making it much worse. Everyone in the waiting room was complaining about how mean and uncaring they were both to us and to everyone in general. No one was very happy.

I was pretty hungry by the time we left the hospital and not in a very good mood. I am glad that I at least have my soapbox here to get these things out of my system or I would be really raging. To have been burned by the same hospital twice like that is really embarrassing. I got Min home and she needed to just lie down and relax. I went over to the Wegman’s Pharmacy to have her prescription filled. While I was waiting for that I grabbed a cheese sub from the new sub shop. I also ran into Chris Briffa, Josh will get a laugh out of that, who has been working there for eight years. Some of you will remember him from high school. He didn’t know my name but recognized me immediately as being someone from York. I can’t believe that he remembered me at all. He is four years younger than most of us. His sister is now the Assisstant DA in Olean. I got the medicine and headed back to the house. I talked to my dad on the phone for a while and ranted about the hospital.

Min watched movies while I retreated to my office to catch up on some soarly lacking work. I worked on Arti’s file server and got that all set. Danielle will be able to take it home with her tomorrow. That is a relief to have one more thing done and out of the way. And another that the new Internet line is in. One thing at a time but I am knocking them down. I might even be caught up soon, ha ha.

Okay, I have to be up early tomorrow and I am already exhausted. I didn’t really get any chance to play with my hamster today. He is going to feel neglected. John Stephens (the Surfing IT Wizard) is going to be coming up on Friday night to hang at the Llama house. He has never been up to stay with us. It is too bad that Andy won’t be around. I hope that everyone has been diligently reading the site recently because I have really been putting an effort into keeping it up to date all of the time again and trying to really get a lot more content into it. I think that as I work on the site day to day and year to year, I am getting a lot more used to having a digital diary and I find it much easier to talk to everyone in this format. It is also a whole lot easier to tell everyone what is going on like this instead of having to email or call everyone individually to let them know the latest news.

Oh, I almost forgot. I totally went off on MBNA American Credit today. They have called me five times on my cell phone out of the last six business days. Everytime it has been incredibly inconvenient and each time I explain to them that this is my cell phone and I a) don’t do any business like this over the phone and b) don’t appreciate getting calls on my cell phone. I ripped into the guy asking why they felt that it was okay to call me day after day. Even if I was buying the stuff that they were selling it wouldn’t be okay to call me that often. Even on a land line. But on a cell phone after many requests to be taken off of they call list is just ridiculous. Plus, it is illegal to make sales calls to cell phones anyway. (That is not totally true, you cannot call cell phones with auto-dialers, but hand dialing is allowed.) But I am sure they are not hand dialing. I really ripped into the poor sales guy. I told him to get his managed and explain to his managed the legal consequences of calling me again. I was in rare form. 🙂 The bottom line is, don’t get an MBNA credit card because they are just bastards.

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