Monday, December 7, 2015

Just Call Me Doctor Sam

Doctor Buchanan said he's a down home Fort Worth man and just call me Sam.

In sixty-five years, this is the first time any doctor has ever suggested I use his or her first name.  It's a little unnerving to talk to a doctor in this way but he's one great guy and he went straight to the situation.

Five locations were frozen since that's the standard for dealing with anything pre-cancerous, one other gets a different treatment, and two others were excised for biopsy.  Doctor Sam said it's not likely a Mohs procedure (i.e. multi-step surgery to remove a skin cancer) will be necessary and follow-up surgery to get rid of them altogether will be relatively easy.  He said he does not think either of the ones on my arm is malignant.

Note:  Mohs is mentioned because the procedure has been used previously to deal with a different skin cancer in a previous time.


The biopsies will not affect playing.  This stuff is stingy but not debilitating.


There is tremendous relief in Cowtown.  The unknown is the worst and I've had enough skin cancers already to know you don't screw around with this stuff.  If I know what's happening then I can deal with it.  When the Dr Suresh Nayak in Cincinnati told me he needed to take my shoulder apart in yet another surgery, the only reaction from me was let's get on with it.

Note:  Dr Suresh Nayak has my highest possible recommendation.  If not for his surgery, there is no chance I could be playing today.


Something Doctor Sam said regarding the VA computer system may be interesting to you.  He said the system for keeping track of patients, procedures, medicines, etc is an incredibly complex piece of software to use but it's excellent and he said specifically it's the best he has seen.  He was on staff at seven hospitals at once and each had a different system for keeping track of patients.  That makes things needlessly complex for doctors and also makes it needlessly difficult to share medical information.


There is a great deal of fear in America regarding the privacy of medical information but that privacy has cost me vastly more than it ever did toward prevention of unauthorized use.  I would have been on a disability pension five years ago but my medical records are so scattered it's impossible to gather them.  The smug bitch at Liberty Mutual, Todd Rosenberg, was making decisions on my record and he couldn't even see most of it.

No need to write an editorial on the difficulty of obtaining medical records from doctors because likely you already know from your own experience.  Based on my experience, my advocacy is more likely to be toward greater disclosure rather than less of it because the difficulty in obtaining records has cost me severely.


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