Wednesday, April 05, 2006

State Government, Sensitive Above All To The Feelings Of It's Citizens

Jesus I'm full. I still have enough of that Midwestern financial frugality bred into me that I have to make damn sure I get my money's worth whenever I find myself at an all you can eat buffet. Can...barely...move...my......fingers...to...type....not going to eat again for days I think.

Now that I feel like a fat slob I'm reminded of a customer I had a few years back. This guy was the real thing. I'm not kidding you when I say his car leaned over to one side when he was driving. Five hundred pounds at least. Jimmy Hoffa might have been buried in the folds of his flesh. To his credit though, he decided he needed to make a change for the better, so he talked to his doctor about the best ways to lose some poundage. Doc writes him a prescription for Meridia and sends him over to me. Thing is, Meridia is way expensive, and Medicaid wants to make sure you're actually losing weight before they shell out the bucks for it, so they require the patient to be weighed every month before they'll approve the claim. Fair enough, but this guy was so fat he was off the scales at his doctors office, making it impossible to get a reading of his weight. I explained the situation to my friendly Medicaid bureaucrat, and they OK the prescription for a few months, but then decided they had to get some sort of measurement of this guy's girth before they would pay anymore.

"Well, what do you suggest?" The drugnazi asked.

"Maybe he could go to a slaughterhouse" was the reply. It took a second for that to sink in. I mean, what if the slaughterhouse mistook him for one of their clients and he ended up in Kroger's vacuum pre-pack for freshness section? Now I've had to explain to women that they were too late in getting their morning after pills, I've had to explain to a woman that the only way she could have acquired her STD was from her cheating husband when she didn't want to believe it, and day after day I have to tell people who can't afford it that the only person who can help them is a doctor. But I have never had as hard a conversation as when I had to go to the counter and tell a guy that his state government wanted him to go to a place that processes dead animals to get weighed.

That didn't stop me and my chief tech from mooing softly whenever we saw him from that point on though. I think he ended up going to a moving company.

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