Cup of Coffee: Programming Note

Fourteen hours in the hospital and some light drug smuggling

There’s an episode from the second season of “M*A*S*H” entitled “For Want of a Boot.” It begins with Hawkeye wanting a new pair of boots because his has a hole in in it. To get the boots from the supply sergeant he has to convince the camp dentist to fix the supply sergeant’s tooth. To get the dentist to do that, he has to get him a three-day pass to Tokyo. To get the three day pass to Tokyo he needs to get signoff from Colonel Blake. To get signoff from Colonel Blake, he needs to get Hot Lips to drop a complaint against him, but she will only do that if Hawkeye and Trapper are nice to Frank Burns. It goes on and on like that with Hawkeye having to do additional small things for additional people in order for the chain of favors to result in him getting new boots. And, of course, in the end it all falls apart and Hawkeye does not get his new boots.

I was thinking of that episode while I spent 14 hours — 14 hours! — at the hospital with my dad yesterday, trying to get him new boots. Which, once you adjust for the level of insanity currently coursing through my body, means “a bed in a nursing facility where he can get the PT he needs so he can go home.”

The day began in the ICU where he has been for well over a week with his heart surgeon saying “we’re gonna get you out of here today!” The day ended with my dad, in that bed at the nursing facility where he he will do what he needs to do in order to go back home and resume his normal post-heart surgery life. In between those two things were a great many phone calls, personal meetings, actual promises, implied promises, and some mild chicanery in which I was compelled to engage in order to convince the nursing home to take him and the hospital to release him despite all manner of strange and seemingly unnecessary bureaucratic and pharmaceutical impediments standing in the way.

I won’t bore you with the details of all of that, but know that it (a) required every bit of residual advocacy and argument skills I still possess from my lawyer days; and (b) required me to mule something like $22,500 worth of rare and high-grade drugs in my coat pocket from one place to another and then to a third location in such a way so that some people knew that I had them and other people did not know that I had them. That may sound rather fucked up, but by around 9pm last night my dad was falling asleep peacefully in his quite nice nursing facility and I had somehow not committed any federal crimes. At least I think. In other news, our healthcare system is beyond borked in this country.

Needless to say, all of that pretty much kept me from being able to write a newsletter yesterday so, once again, I am putting in for some PTO. Barring anything unexpected this should be my last PTO request for a while. Of course, if I could bar anything unexpected the last month of my life would not be the tire fire that it has been, so let’s not think too hard about that.

In the meantime, today I will be (mostly) back home, doing the things I normally do on Thursdays. Things like taking out the garbage, doing some laundry, compiling items for Friday’s newsletter, and not — unless I can help it — smuggling rare and insane drugs for geriatric chronic lymphocytic leukemia/heart bypass patients halfway across the county with the aid of subterfuge and half-truths.

Have a great day everyone.