A few weeks ago, I got a letter congratulating me on qualifying for a stimulus check. The letter further stated that if I'd filed electronically, I'd get the funds direct deposited. Since I'm still fully employed and wasn't in need of the stimulus, I didn't think much about it till last week. None of my bank accounts seemed to be surplused by the amount specified in the letter. So, I did a quick search of my accounts and found no deposits in any of them - even having checked as far back as the first of the month prior to the letter.
So, I hit the IRS check-tracking site. After entering my info, it told me an electronic payment shoould have shown up during the second half of May and to doublecheck with my bank before filing a trace-request. I double-checked and, as before, no evidence of a deposit from the IRS.
I returned to the IRS site to see what I should do. I found the steps for filing a trace. The site told me to call an 800 number. I called the 800 number where, after holding for half an hour, the person that answered my call told me that the staff answering that number don't actually have the power to initiate a trace. I instead had to call a different number – a non toll-free number. Of course, this made me wonder "why the fuck is the IRS.Gov website saying to call the 800 number rather than the number I had to get from that 800 number after the long hold??"
At any rate, I called the number. SEVERAL TIMES. Each of the first few times, the number rang, I got a message saying the call was being transferred, heard what sounded like touch-tone numbers being auto-punched ...and then dead silence. Not a summary hangup, simply dead silence. I tried a half dozen or so times, last week, each time the same as the first. With my last failure, Friday, I decided, "I'll try once more on Monday morning. If that fails, I'll re-try the 800 number and see if there's a different number to call."
This morning, instead of getting the rerouting message, I got a "estimated hold time is 30-60 minutes" message and placed in a hold-queue with not entirely insanity-inducing hold-music. At the 62-minute mark, I got a message saying the call was being transferred to a representative ...followed by what sounded like touch-tone numbers being auto-punched ...and then dead silence.
Vexed, I called the original 800 number back. Waited 15 minutes for a human to pick up. I explained why I was calling a number I knew didn't have the power to help me track my payment (and that the website said it WAS the number I needed to call). The agent told me he'd try to transfer me to the group that did have the power to do the tracing. I heard a few clicks and got transferred to a hold-queue. A hold-queue that started by telling me the current hold time was in excess of 60 minutes ...followed by the same hold music I'd already listened to for 62 minutes, today.
I set my phone to speaker mode and continued about my day's work. At about the 95 minute mark, a message saying I was being transferred, followed by what sounded like touch-tone numbers being auto-punched. This time, however, I actually got a human. She asked me for my info. She then did a quick search and tells me, "you were sent a debit card". I was a skosh incredulous given that the IRS.Gov site had said I should have received a direct deposit – I stated as much to her, further informing her that I've been electronically filing my taxes for well more than a decade and that, prior to Trump's tax "cut" receiving my refunds via direct deposit (since the "cut", I've been electronically paying my taxes from the same accounts that the refunds were direct-deposited to). She told me to wait while she re-verified. A few seconds passed and she verified that I would have been mailed a debit card.
She then told me that the letter would have looked like junk-mail. In my head, I silently railed, "who the fuck thought it was a good idea to make these things look like junk-mail???". She also informed me that I would have to contact the card-issuer to get a new card issued. Apparently, the IRS distributed the fund by way of a commercial provider.
So, yeah, $560Bn+ was given to a corporation to distrubute. A corporation that, no doubt, is both getting a contracted-rate for administering the distribution of funds and I imagine they were given a lump-sum to distribute and are getting investment income from every dollar that they can hold onto before recipients use the last few cents of the debit card. Similarly, if a card gets "lost in the mail", then "replacement fees may apply".
And, I get that they're trying to get people to spend the money rather than throw it into savings. But forcing me to take the funds by way of a debit card when I (fortunately) don't have any urgent expenses is just dicktacular. The whole thing smells like it was architected to line the pockets of the stimulus-distributor – probably a Trump cronie – rather than get useful money into people's hands.
Further, as someone not exactly currently in a position of need, sending me a payment now, rather than if/when I might actually need it just seems really piss-poor. These one-time, lump-sum things rather than a proper social safety-net programs don't really encourage people to spend: knowing that you'll still have money (for food and shelter) tomorrow is a better way to ensure that people will spend today (in a way that keeps the economy humming).
Monday, June 29, 2020
Monday, April 6, 2020
Then What the Fuck Was It???
Became symptomatic three Thursdays ago (19th). Lasted into the first weekend. Hadn't wanted to be a hyphochondriac or one of the people overwhelming the system. So, I avoided looking up symptoms to try to avoid psyching myself into any I wasn't already displaying. Sat on the increasing illness until that first Sunday night, then went to the CDC website and did the health survey-bot thing. It said, "call your GP about testing".
Called first thing that Monday (23rd). Their lines were, naturally, busy. I selected the "call me back" option. Day passed by with no callback. Since GP's office was due to close at 1700, I called at 1600 to find out, "yo: should I have maybe been called back by now". Got hold of one of the office staff. They said there was no record of my morning call, so, no, I wasn't on the scheduled to be called back. Naturally, I'm thinking, "damned good thing I don't really 'trust the system'." At any rate, she said the my GP was tied up, at the moment, but that she'd put me on the immediate call-back list.
GP called back about 20 minutes later. He ran me through my symptoms and reviewed my health-history chart. He agreed that my symptoms and their progression – combined with my overall health history (immunocompromised due to my arthritis medications) – would normally warrant getting the test. However, he wasn't going to prescribe one at that time. He reasoned that, because the tests take 7+ days to come back and was already four days into my symptoms, I'd presumably either be recovering or in an ER (where I'd get higher-priority testing as a result) by the time results came back. That said, he told me that if, at any point, my fever went over 101, to call immediately for a reassessment.
Couple days later, symptoms started to abate. But, a day and a half later, they returned and were worse.
Having, by that time read up on things, one of the things I'd read was that a lull followed by a return and worsening of symptoms was also a normal progress-path for COVID-19. The really unfun note about that particular progress-path was that it was the more-common one for the 20% of people that end up needing hospitalization. Dandy.
Saturday night, my temperature hit 101.7. Having hit the proverbial red line, I called the GP's after-hours number. The rotation-GP told me to switch from regular cold meds in favor of taking 1000mg/8h (3000mg/dy) of acetaminophen-only. She also prescribed me the test and instructed me to get the first appointment I could the immediately-following Monday (30th).
A few hours after taking the first 1000mg dose, my fever started to come down a skosh. The first 24 hours, it hovered in the 100.0s depending on where in the dosing sweet-spot I was. Tried to level things out a bit by switching from the 8-hour dosing of 1000mg to 4-hour dosings of 500mg. Flattened the peaks and valleys a bit by doing so.
Given that my arthritis meds already cause liver-sensitivity, I decided to follow-up with my GP a couple days later (Wednesday, Apr 1). Wanted to ask about reducing the daily intake. I wasn't relishing the thought of saving my lungs but killing my liver. GP informed me that they had patiets in clinical liver failure that tolerated over 2000mg/dy for extended periods. However, he agreed that it was probably better for me to do the "half as much twice as frequently" thing I'd already started doing and, if symptoms allowed, try to go to 500mg every 5-6 hours instead.
My symptoms were moderately controlled under that regimen between Monday and the Wednesday I'd called my GP back about dosing. Unforutnately, the night after talking to my GP, (Thursday, April 2nd) when temperature increased its upward trend to just shy of 103 even on 500mg/4h and was starting to experience right-lung constriction and pain to go along with increased violence of the hacking cough.
I thought I might have to call the ER to let them know to prepare for a possible COVID19 arrival ("possible" since results still weren't due till today). Didn't tell my wife about the ER thoughts or the lung pain and constriction because she was already freaked out by the progression of things and tends not to be proverbial "rock" when things start looking like they're at risk of going sideways.
At any rate, since whatever I have consistently been hitting its temperature-peaks around midnight and this spike happened around midnight (ironically, was a day or two after this spike that I read an article that said nighttime temperature-spikes were also normal for COVID-19), I decided I'd try going to sleep and see if things were less awful in the morning. Took a double-dose of Tylenol PM in hopes it would both knock me out and curb the temperature and coughing-spike. Woke up 7 hours later with my temperature back down in the mid 99.0s.
Friday wasn't much better (evening temperature continued to hover in the high 100.0s to mid 101.0s, lots of coughing, right lung not feeling quite up to par, diziness etc.), but it also wasn't worse. Since it wasn't worse, I opted to continue to defer care-escalation.
Saturday and Sunday things were starting to head in the right direction: I was able to keep my temperature in the high-to-mid 99.0s most of each day on 500mg dosings (4-5 hours Saturday; 6-8 hours on Sunday). Though, each time the thermometer did the "fever" urgent-beep, Donna would come running into the room to ask what the temperature was.
Hospital lab actually called me on a Sunday night (21:12 according to my phone logs) to let me know the results came back negative. I asked the dude, "then WTF do I have that's causing these symptoms on this trajectory and for this long??" Even my GP had said he expected the results to come back positive. He feebly replied "you'll have to talk to your GP." All I could think was "thanks, dude: real helpful."
As I'm want to do, especially when things don't seem to be adding up, I did some further reading on the virus and associated testing methodologies. Found out that, while the RT-PCR test pretty much never provides a false-positive, it had a better than 30% false-negative rate in China and elsewhere and appeared to be doing so at higher rates in the US. Further, one article I found hinted that initial testing-efficacy reviews (though they took care to note that their review of the two English-language studies they'd reviewed – others were in Chinese and they had't had a chance to translate, yet – had yet to be peer-reviewed) seemed to indicate that the oral test might be more prone to false-negatives than the nasal-test. The test I received was the oral test.
Further complicating things is that I had oral surgery in 1998. That surgery left me with a grossly-abnormal throat and posterior-sinus configuration (due to no longer having tonsils, uvula nor much of my soft palate). So, "who fucking knows".
Overall, I'm wondering if we'll ever find out what the accuracy-rates of early(ish) RT-PCR testing proves to be. I'm especially curious about the US and even collection-facility-by-collection-facility differences. Also curious if/when they might take to doing the test as a two-test battery across some period of days, especially given that China's results showed not-infrequent negative-then-positive testing-results both on asymptomatic and symptomatic carriers.
Called first thing that Monday (23rd). Their lines were, naturally, busy. I selected the "call me back" option. Day passed by with no callback. Since GP's office was due to close at 1700, I called at 1600 to find out, "yo: should I have maybe been called back by now". Got hold of one of the office staff. They said there was no record of my morning call, so, no, I wasn't on the scheduled to be called back. Naturally, I'm thinking, "damned good thing I don't really 'trust the system'." At any rate, she said the my GP was tied up, at the moment, but that she'd put me on the immediate call-back list.
GP called back about 20 minutes later. He ran me through my symptoms and reviewed my health-history chart. He agreed that my symptoms and their progression – combined with my overall health history (immunocompromised due to my arthritis medications) – would normally warrant getting the test. However, he wasn't going to prescribe one at that time. He reasoned that, because the tests take 7+ days to come back and was already four days into my symptoms, I'd presumably either be recovering or in an ER (where I'd get higher-priority testing as a result) by the time results came back. That said, he told me that if, at any point, my fever went over 101, to call immediately for a reassessment.
Couple days later, symptoms started to abate. But, a day and a half later, they returned and were worse.
Having, by that time read up on things, one of the things I'd read was that a lull followed by a return and worsening of symptoms was also a normal progress-path for COVID-19. The really unfun note about that particular progress-path was that it was the more-common one for the 20% of people that end up needing hospitalization. Dandy.
Saturday night, my temperature hit 101.7. Having hit the proverbial red line, I called the GP's after-hours number. The rotation-GP told me to switch from regular cold meds in favor of taking 1000mg/8h (3000mg/dy) of acetaminophen-only. She also prescribed me the test and instructed me to get the first appointment I could the immediately-following Monday (30th).
A few hours after taking the first 1000mg dose, my fever started to come down a skosh. The first 24 hours, it hovered in the 100.0s depending on where in the dosing sweet-spot I was. Tried to level things out a bit by switching from the 8-hour dosing of 1000mg to 4-hour dosings of 500mg. Flattened the peaks and valleys a bit by doing so.
Given that my arthritis meds already cause liver-sensitivity, I decided to follow-up with my GP a couple days later (Wednesday, Apr 1). Wanted to ask about reducing the daily intake. I wasn't relishing the thought of saving my lungs but killing my liver. GP informed me that they had patiets in clinical liver failure that tolerated over 2000mg/dy for extended periods. However, he agreed that it was probably better for me to do the "half as much twice as frequently" thing I'd already started doing and, if symptoms allowed, try to go to 500mg every 5-6 hours instead.
My symptoms were moderately controlled under that regimen between Monday and the Wednesday I'd called my GP back about dosing. Unforutnately, the night after talking to my GP, (Thursday, April 2nd) when temperature increased its upward trend to just shy of 103 even on 500mg/4h and was starting to experience right-lung constriction and pain to go along with increased violence of the hacking cough.
I thought I might have to call the ER to let them know to prepare for a possible COVID19 arrival ("possible" since results still weren't due till today). Didn't tell my wife about the ER thoughts or the lung pain and constriction because she was already freaked out by the progression of things and tends not to be proverbial "rock" when things start looking like they're at risk of going sideways.
At any rate, since whatever I have consistently been hitting its temperature-peaks around midnight and this spike happened around midnight (ironically, was a day or two after this spike that I read an article that said nighttime temperature-spikes were also normal for COVID-19), I decided I'd try going to sleep and see if things were less awful in the morning. Took a double-dose of Tylenol PM in hopes it would both knock me out and curb the temperature and coughing-spike. Woke up 7 hours later with my temperature back down in the mid 99.0s.
Friday wasn't much better (evening temperature continued to hover in the high 100.0s to mid 101.0s, lots of coughing, right lung not feeling quite up to par, diziness etc.), but it also wasn't worse. Since it wasn't worse, I opted to continue to defer care-escalation.
Saturday and Sunday things were starting to head in the right direction: I was able to keep my temperature in the high-to-mid 99.0s most of each day on 500mg dosings (4-5 hours Saturday; 6-8 hours on Sunday). Though, each time the thermometer did the "fever" urgent-beep, Donna would come running into the room to ask what the temperature was.
Hospital lab actually called me on a Sunday night (21:12 according to my phone logs) to let me know the results came back negative. I asked the dude, "then WTF do I have that's causing these symptoms on this trajectory and for this long??" Even my GP had said he expected the results to come back positive. He feebly replied "you'll have to talk to your GP." All I could think was "thanks, dude: real helpful."
As I'm want to do, especially when things don't seem to be adding up, I did some further reading on the virus and associated testing methodologies. Found out that, while the RT-PCR test pretty much never provides a false-positive, it had a better than 30% false-negative rate in China and elsewhere and appeared to be doing so at higher rates in the US. Further, one article I found hinted that initial testing-efficacy reviews (though they took care to note that their review of the two English-language studies they'd reviewed – others were in Chinese and they had't had a chance to translate, yet – had yet to be peer-reviewed) seemed to indicate that the oral test might be more prone to false-negatives than the nasal-test. The test I received was the oral test.
Further complicating things is that I had oral surgery in 1998. That surgery left me with a grossly-abnormal throat and posterior-sinus configuration (due to no longer having tonsils, uvula nor much of my soft palate). So, "who fucking knows".
Overall, I'm wondering if we'll ever find out what the accuracy-rates of early(ish) RT-PCR testing proves to be. I'm especially curious about the US and even collection-facility-by-collection-facility differences. Also curious if/when they might take to doing the test as a two-test battery across some period of days, especially given that China's results showed not-infrequent negative-then-positive testing-results both on asymptomatic and symptomatic carriers.
Thursday, January 30, 2020
The Other Shoe's Dropping
So, the place we take our doggos to for primary veterinary care announced on FaceBook:
When we first started to go to Alexandria Animal Hospital (now VCA Alexandria), it was a great place. To go: convenient, reasonable (for the area) prices, quick to get appointments, attentive service and had 24 hour emergency services and care. After they got acquired, the prices started to spiral while the service suffered. I'm guessing that those price increases weren't going to staff, especially since they're saying they can't get staff for the after-hours work (maybe if you paid people rather than lining stockholders pockets, you'd be able to get after-hours help?)
Now, after our one dog was diagnosed with cancer, last summer, and we ended up taking her to RVRC's oncology practice. We discovered that we really liked the staff there. However, RVRC's not a general-practice facility. But, the level of care we got reminded us, "there are still independent practices that focus on great care and service," so we asked if they knew any general-practice vets near us that had the type of care that Alexandria Animal Hospital had lost in the years following their acquisition by VCA. They gave us a list, but I kind of sat on it. In the back of my mind was, "do I want to change practices when VCA Alexandria is where I'll need to go for emergency services, any way." Well, that FaceBook post changes the equation.
To all these corporations buying out veterinary practices: "fuck you". You don't provide the level of care that brought in the customer bases you bought. You don't provide the level of service. And you're fucking price-gougers (which, if I thought was going to your staff rather than investors, I wouldn't mind). I hope VCA, Banfield, etc. all fucking die in a fire.
Me? I guess I'll need to find a new, independent practice before this year's annual checkups are due.
Dear Clients,I'll repeat that: they announced this via facebook rather than doing their customers the favor of directly mailing or emailing them, first.
After serving the community for over thirty-one (31) years, our emergency service will be closing the doors on February 24th, 2020. Despite all of our efforts, we have been unable to hire able and willing veterinarians to work the difficult overnight hours.
Our doors will remain open for urgent care needs during our general practice hours.
We hope to expand our general practice hours during the weekdays and on Saturdays and Sundays to provide you with more opportunities to for appointments and urgent care.
There are quite a few area hospitals that offer overnight emergency care and below some are listed:
Sincerely,
- VCA Southpaws, Springfield, VA
- VCA Woodbridge, Woodbridge, VA
- Regional Veterinary Referral Center, Springfield, VA
- Colombia Pike Animal Hospital,
- The Hope Center, Vienna, VA
- Friendship Animal Hospital, Washington, DC
VCA Alexandria Animal Hospital Veterinarians and staff.
When we first started to go to Alexandria Animal Hospital (now VCA Alexandria), it was a great place. To go: convenient, reasonable (for the area) prices, quick to get appointments, attentive service and had 24 hour emergency services and care. After they got acquired, the prices started to spiral while the service suffered. I'm guessing that those price increases weren't going to staff, especially since they're saying they can't get staff for the after-hours work (maybe if you paid people rather than lining stockholders pockets, you'd be able to get after-hours help?)
Now, after our one dog was diagnosed with cancer, last summer, and we ended up taking her to RVRC's oncology practice. We discovered that we really liked the staff there. However, RVRC's not a general-practice facility. But, the level of care we got reminded us, "there are still independent practices that focus on great care and service," so we asked if they knew any general-practice vets near us that had the type of care that Alexandria Animal Hospital had lost in the years following their acquisition by VCA. They gave us a list, but I kind of sat on it. In the back of my mind was, "do I want to change practices when VCA Alexandria is where I'll need to go for emergency services, any way." Well, that FaceBook post changes the equation.
To all these corporations buying out veterinary practices: "fuck you". You don't provide the level of care that brought in the customer bases you bought. You don't provide the level of service. And you're fucking price-gougers (which, if I thought was going to your staff rather than investors, I wouldn't mind). I hope VCA, Banfield, etc. all fucking die in a fire.
Me? I guess I'll need to find a new, independent practice before this year's annual checkups are due.
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