In an issue of the Santa Fe New Mexican last week there was an insert published by the National Union of Hospital and Health Care Employees, which is an affiliate of the larger AFSCME/AFL-CIO. The nurses and technicians at Christus St. Vincent Hospital in Santa Fe have been involved in protracted negotiations with hospital management over wages and conditions—safe staffing and experience—and as I write this union members are voting on the proposed contract.
The insert, as part of the union’s message to the public regarding the struggles of the nurses and technicians, includes a list of the salaries of “Officers, Directors, Trustees, Key Employees, and Highest Compensated Employees” of Christus. The CEO, Alex Valdez, makes a whopping $457,064 (and $148,122 estimated fringe benefits). But lo and behold, the highest compensation by far on the list belongs to my old friend Dr. Samuel Chun, an orthopedic surgeon, whose makes $935,275. He’s not really my friend, but I did see him as often as I see many of my friends when I was referred to him for treatment of a bone spur on the lower part of my thumb. After shooting me up with cortisone a couple of times, which did nothing to alleviate the pain, he proceeded to remove the bone spur, which he did quite well, as he appears to be an excellent surgeon (although he forgot to take a look at a mass on my palm while he was doing the cutting). But then the trouble began, which should have been included in my Diary of a Bad Year, except that it would have made it the Diary of My Two and a Half Bad Years and I wouldn’t have been able to use J.M. Coetzee’s title.
I wasn’t blogging back then but I've always done my best venting by pen so I sent him a letter. He never answered, of course, but now that I’m blogging I’m going repeat some of what I said in the letter. You never know, maybe someone who is considering orthopedic surgery will read this posting and decide NOT to choose Chun and NOT to contribute to his $935,275 compensation package.
After my cast was removed Chun’s office sent me to a physical therapist who specializes in hands and arms. I didn’t get any better: my thumb hurt horribly and my shoulder froze. I was treated by the actual physical therapist only once; subsequently it was by her aides, and nothing helped. I figured it was time to go back to Chun with my troubles, but each time you go see him you have to wait at least at hour for a 10-minute visit, so I procrastinated. When I finally told him my tale of woe he asked me if I wanted him to cast my thumb again. I told him no, I wanted him to figure out why it was taking me so long to heal. He offered to shoot up my shoulder with more cortisone, and I told him no on that one, too.
He told me to come back in another month, which I did, still miserable. This time he said, I want to consult with my partner who specializes in shoulders. So I made an appointment with this other orthopod (I waited for an appointment and then I once again waited in the waiting room). This doc asked me some questions, checked out the lack of mobility in my arm and hand and said to me, I want to go consult with Chun. I’d been there for all of 10 minutes. He came back into the room and said, I just talked with Dr. Chun and I think you have RSD. I asked, what’s that, and he said, it’s a syndrome that can be treated at the pain clinic with a “sympathetic nerve block”, meaning a shot of anesthesia in the neck. I didn’t like the idea of a shot in my neck but I was pretty desperate for a diagnosis, so I took him at his word. Fortunately (or unfortunately) I had the presence of mind to ask the technician to spell out the name of this diagnosis, which was Reflex Sympathetic Dystrophy.
When I got home I did what anyone with a computer does these days: I went on the internet and looked up RSD. It was then I burst into tears. Reflex Sympathetic Dystrophy, or Complex Regional Pain Syndrome, is a chronic pain condition or “continuous, intense pain out of proportion to the severity of the injury.” It can start in your hand and spread to include the entire arm. There is no cure, and no definitive drug or treatment procedure, i.e., the sympathetic nerve block that Chun’s buddy was prepared to order. On one of the internet sites the words “some people can have unremitting pain and crippling and irreversible changes in spite of treatment” especially stood out.
That was the end of my relationship with Chun and his partner, who I suspect makes a six figure compensation as well. I found another orthopedic doc in Española who looked at my medical records and the RSD diagnosis and said to me, let’s not go there. So I didn’t, and with the help of a good physical therapist and many hours of evaluation by the new doc I eventually healed. In my letter to Chun I suggested that he spend some of the money he was making (at the time I had no idea how much that actually was) on a patient navigator who could follow the progress of everyone who makes his or her way through the maze of his assembly line practice. But that kind of practice works efficiently only when patients are in and out the door. Once it was obvious that I was a malingerer, he wasn’t interested.
So that’s the story. The solution is simple: Christus St. Vincent can pay Dr. Chun and his cohort a salary just like it pays the nurses and techs who work their butts off to take care of all of us before and after the surgeons stroll in with the scalpels. If they can do it at the Mayo Clinic, they can do it in Fanta Se.
Sunday, July 31, 2011
Wednesday, July 6, 2011
Diary of a Bad Year: Invasion of the Bats
I thought maybe the noise from the air monitoring station that the New Mexico Environment Department put outside my house two days after the Las Conchas fire broke out would scare away the bats, but no such luck. El Valle is one of the LANL downwind communities where the ED has been monitoring the air, soil, and water—largely due to the efforts of Sheri Kotowski of the Embudo Valley Environmental Monitoring Group, which came into existence after the Cerro Grande fire, the first time smoke and ash polluted our agricultural communities.
I was hopeful that besides measuring the potential fallout of Isotopic plutonium, Isotopic uranium, Strontium, Americium, Beryllium, and heavy metals the monitoring station, which sits next to the southwest corner of my house where the bats come every evening to feed, would annoy them enough so they’d vacate the premises. But they’re obviously doing more than just feeding because not only didn’t they go away, they decided to do some exploring inside my house, just like they did last year around this time. I figure they’ve got nests in between the tin roof and wood ceiling where they’re taking care of the “pups”— what the mammologist at New Mexico Game and Fish, who I phoned in desperation, called them.
Apparently they’re getting in through all the little cracks—they only need a half inch—around the beams and stove pipe and ceiling boards up in the loft of my very tall house. When they made their way into the house for the first time last year they met their match in Jake Kosek, our Berkeley friend who’s spent a lot of time in el norte. He was here to help bring in the wood supply after Mark was diagnosed with cancer. We were just sitting around in the kids’ old bedroom, yakking—Jake, our son Jakob (also part of the wood cutting crew), Mark, and me, when the bats started zooming through the air above our heads. As I recall I ran screaming from the room, but good old Jake just laughed, turned down the lights so the bats would settle down (or settle up, as they hang on walls and beams, they don’t perch), whipped off his shirt, threw it over one of the suckers, and tossed it outside. The other bat started up, tried to fly out of the room, knocked itself silly, and landed on the stairs. To redeem myself I threw a T-shirt over the prostrate bat and tossed it outside as well. After Jake left I filled up every crack I could find with expandable foam and nailed lath over that, but there continued to be bats in the bedroom until the pups were fledged: every night I shut the bedroom door while they flew around the room. In the morning they were gone.
Right on schedule they were back again this year. Last night I saw only one flying around the upstairs bedroom but there have been more: two, three, a dozen maybe, after they pushed in the screen on one of the windows where they congregate outside. I quickly slammed the door and by morning they’d flown back out the window, which I closed for good. While I’m not particularly thrilled at having bats flying around my house, I haven’t vacated the premises, either. But it has limited who I can invite to spend the night. You can’t have the grandmother from Cleveland (the inside joke when referencing someone who has no idea what living la vida loca in northern New Mexico means).
I lucked out that their arrival this year coincided with Jakob and Casey’s weekend visit. Jakob is now on a mission to get rid of these “f*#!ing bats.” The first night he caught two of them in a shirt, but was a little too zealous and kind of crushed them in the process. They ended up outside, dead. The next day we went over every possible nook and cranny with more foam and lath. Then my neighbor Tony, who comes over most evenings to fill water containers from my well, as the water line to his trailer is busted and they’ve yet to determine where, told us that he could see where the bats were flying in under one of the beams. So Jakob and I put up the 30-foot ladder, he climbed up with foam and lath and plugged that hole with a vengeance. Then we went inside, crawled into the nethermost regions of the loft with our headlamps and masks, and plugged the same hole from the inside. I’m sure that if we’ve been successful in stopping the ingress and egress of the bats the animal liberationists who read this blog are going to charge me with animal cruelty, but I challenge any of them to share their house with bats, their gardens with gophers, and their chickens with pigeons before they put my handcuffs on.
I’m really ready for both the bats and the incessantly noisy air monitor to be gone. I’m also ready for the day-long buildup of rain clouds to unleash their blessings and salvage what’s left of my parched fields (the Temptations’ song “Oh how I wish that it would rain, rain, rain” plays over and over inside my head). In my 20 years in El Valle I’ve never seen it so bad. None of us in the southwest—or at least this generation— have ever seen it so bad. Perhaps the world has never seen it so bad. But that’s another story.
I was hopeful that besides measuring the potential fallout of Isotopic plutonium, Isotopic uranium, Strontium, Americium, Beryllium, and heavy metals the monitoring station, which sits next to the southwest corner of my house where the bats come every evening to feed, would annoy them enough so they’d vacate the premises. But they’re obviously doing more than just feeding because not only didn’t they go away, they decided to do some exploring inside my house, just like they did last year around this time. I figure they’ve got nests in between the tin roof and wood ceiling where they’re taking care of the “pups”— what the mammologist at New Mexico Game and Fish, who I phoned in desperation, called them.
Apparently they’re getting in through all the little cracks—they only need a half inch—around the beams and stove pipe and ceiling boards up in the loft of my very tall house. When they made their way into the house for the first time last year they met their match in Jake Kosek, our Berkeley friend who’s spent a lot of time in el norte. He was here to help bring in the wood supply after Mark was diagnosed with cancer. We were just sitting around in the kids’ old bedroom, yakking—Jake, our son Jakob (also part of the wood cutting crew), Mark, and me, when the bats started zooming through the air above our heads. As I recall I ran screaming from the room, but good old Jake just laughed, turned down the lights so the bats would settle down (or settle up, as they hang on walls and beams, they don’t perch), whipped off his shirt, threw it over one of the suckers, and tossed it outside. The other bat started up, tried to fly out of the room, knocked itself silly, and landed on the stairs. To redeem myself I threw a T-shirt over the prostrate bat and tossed it outside as well. After Jake left I filled up every crack I could find with expandable foam and nailed lath over that, but there continued to be bats in the bedroom until the pups were fledged: every night I shut the bedroom door while they flew around the room. In the morning they were gone.
Right on schedule they were back again this year. Last night I saw only one flying around the upstairs bedroom but there have been more: two, three, a dozen maybe, after they pushed in the screen on one of the windows where they congregate outside. I quickly slammed the door and by morning they’d flown back out the window, which I closed for good. While I’m not particularly thrilled at having bats flying around my house, I haven’t vacated the premises, either. But it has limited who I can invite to spend the night. You can’t have the grandmother from Cleveland (the inside joke when referencing someone who has no idea what living la vida loca in northern New Mexico means).
I lucked out that their arrival this year coincided with Jakob and Casey’s weekend visit. Jakob is now on a mission to get rid of these “f*#!ing bats.” The first night he caught two of them in a shirt, but was a little too zealous and kind of crushed them in the process. They ended up outside, dead. The next day we went over every possible nook and cranny with more foam and lath. Then my neighbor Tony, who comes over most evenings to fill water containers from my well, as the water line to his trailer is busted and they’ve yet to determine where, told us that he could see where the bats were flying in under one of the beams. So Jakob and I put up the 30-foot ladder, he climbed up with foam and lath and plugged that hole with a vengeance. Then we went inside, crawled into the nethermost regions of the loft with our headlamps and masks, and plugged the same hole from the inside. I’m sure that if we’ve been successful in stopping the ingress and egress of the bats the animal liberationists who read this blog are going to charge me with animal cruelty, but I challenge any of them to share their house with bats, their gardens with gophers, and their chickens with pigeons before they put my handcuffs on.
I’m really ready for both the bats and the incessantly noisy air monitor to be gone. I’m also ready for the day-long buildup of rain clouds to unleash their blessings and salvage what’s left of my parched fields (the Temptations’ song “Oh how I wish that it would rain, rain, rain” plays over and over inside my head). In my 20 years in El Valle I’ve never seen it so bad. None of us in the southwest—or at least this generation— have ever seen it so bad. Perhaps the world has never seen it so bad. But that’s another story.
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