January 8, 2015

Today was an interesting day for me.  I have forced myself to do some medical maintenance which is to say that I had my annual physical, which for me is not annual!

The doctor that I have been seeing since I was 19 years old retired this past fall.  So now what?  After some internet searching I decided to try one of the family practitioners at our local county clinic.

Everything went fine, and I'm as healthy as a horse, except for some of the usual aches and pains of aging and being a girl.

After I saw the doctor I stopped in at the school as I have a job to do there!  I am cleaning and organizing the tool room in the shop classroom, and let me tell you, it needs to be cleaned and organized.  I have not been in that room since I was a freshman in high school and lots of stuff looks familiar!

Activities like this allow me time to think and I have two thoughts from today.

The first is a thought about one of the things that I believe is a problem with the health care system.
You know how when you go to the doctor and the assistant comes in and asks you a whole bunch of questions, and they take your blood pressure and your pulse and then enter all that information in to the computer?

 Well, I think the doctor should be doing all this.  That time is when the real information comes out.  If the doctor was taking your blood pressure, and asking you all the questions, they would be getting some very valuable information.  Sure, they glance at the information on the computer screen, while they ask you a few questions, but they aren't really listening.  They are reading the answers that you gave to the assistant, and half listening to what you are saying.

This is the trouble, there's a lot of half listening.  Luckily and thankfully, I am healthy, but what if I wasn't?  What if I wasn't good at saying what was going on with my body or my mind?  What if I didn't really want to tell my "story" twice, thinking that telling it once was enough?  What if a physician sat down with you and really listened to what you were saying, even if you weren't saying much at all?

I know these folks are busy, but so am I.  I didn't want to take two hours out of my day today to drive to Davenport and wait in an office, and read the old magazines on the coffee table, and then tell the same old story to someone that I didn't know, but would like to know a little better than what I ended up knowing.  And feeling like, OK, sure I'm healthy, but I would like to have a conversation about what is happening to my aging body.  Luckily, I am fine.  And luckily I liked this new doctor.  And luckily I do have a measure of confidence that if something were to go wrong with my health, I could turn to her and know that she would do the very best for me that was possible.

I guess I just wanted to be heard.  I guess, for once, I wanted to walk away from a doctors office and think, "well that was worth my time", instead of thinking, "well, that didn't produce much information".

Second, while cleaning and organizing the tool room today I realized that I really love cleaning and organizing. Well, I've known this about myself for quite some time, but perhaps I didn't realize that it's not just my own stuff that I like to clean and organize, but just about anything!

When Roni Jo was very young, I think around 3 years old, she put all the ornamental corn that I had just harvested, into order, from the largest ear to the smallest.  She called me out to the yard to show me what she had done.  She proclaimed "isn't it wonderful mama?"  I replied that it was.  She said,  "As you know mama, I like order"!  Indeed, the child comes by it naturally!

I came across some items that I know where there when I was last in that tool room!  Some items are newer of course, but what fun!  For instance, there was a box of chalk in that room!  How long has it been since a classroom had a chalk board?  Made me smile!

I'm not finished with this project.  I look forward to spending a few more hours putting everything in it's place, because, "as you know mama, I like order"!