St. Sadist Medical Center, how may I direct your call?

So I’m at the metastatic cancer support group meeting, chillin’ with three guys twenty years my senior my boys, bitchin’ about side effects, sad news, and the socialized medicine up in Canada. Well one guy griped about universal health insurance, at least until I adjusted his pillow for him just right. He didn’t say much else after that. Yeah I’m gangsta, I can kick an 80-year-old’s ass! Just, hold still while I get out the pepper spray.

Anyhow, the two senior citizens left my crew kicked around reviews of different doctors and hospitals, the consensus being that Kansas City was not known for superior health care* and that it was best to go to an elite hospital out of town. I pissed all over my entourage and told them about all the bullets I dodged at that Hospital of Eminent Influence in New York — HEINY. Then I looked for a towel to clean off the urine.

But I’d still rather go to HEINY than to St. Joseph Medical Center here in K.C. MO. Actually, I’d rather go anywhere than St. Jo. KCMO — a Dane Cook concert, a Ron Paul rally, Hell; anywhere’s better than the hospital where advances in medicine go to die, taking half the patients with them. If an ambulance driver tells me he’s headed there I’ll find the strength to bust open the back doors and roll my stretcher away to safety like Adam West did on that one episode of Batman. Technically two episodes, I guess, but, well, you know what I mean.

Why the hard feelings? Well there was that surgeon who bungled my first operation. Maybe ‘bungle’ is too good a word — all he did was leave a bunch of surgical staples kicking around my rectum, right where you’d want them to be. Then he lied about it. And he neglected to periodically dilate my anus in the months after surgery — as the British say, he couldn’t be arsed. He mangled the site badly enough that I now have a colostomy for life; I was told it’d be temporary. Maybe he figured I would be temporary and it wouldn’t matter.

Did I mention the pain medication Dr. Conner prescribed upon my release? Darvocet. Darvocet! As one nurse said, that’s only a step above baby aspirin. This nurse was a good one who also worked at St. Jo., but she got farmed out in a cost-cutting move. Her replacement at the radiologist’s office there couldn’t read a calendar and couldn’t pronounce the word “coccygectomy.” If you can’t pronounce it either, don’t feel bad — it’s an odd bird, this business of shaving off your tailbone. In fact, according to these guys,

This surgery is rarely performed, and the procedure is not even included in most spine surgery textbooks.

So you can see why the St. Jo radiologist was recommending it for a bout of anal bleeding. What could go wrong! I passed gas and found another doc in town to look into that bloody butt business. He ran a colonoscopy on me, or tried to at any rate. Come to find out that surgeon #1 had left a stricture in my rectum so tight that surgeon #2 couldn’t even stick the tip in get the scope past it. That sent me to surgeon #3 over at HEINY, eventually leading me back to surgeon #4 right here in River City. That feller saved my life — and come to think of it, he has an office over St. Jo. himself.

Focusing on the bright side — you know me Al.

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* Gang violence, meth addicts and a public school system that graduates teenagers who couldn’t spell ‘cat’ if you spotted them the ‘c’ and the ‘t’, sure, we’re famous for those. And ribs, we make great ribs here. But reliable health care, now that you’ve got to make an effort to find.**
** I stole that ‘cat’ joke from Reggie Jackson. If he wants to make something of it he knows where to find me, but I think he’s learned his lesson.
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