KatieFabulous

Okay, so, I checked out this new doctor, who says all of my health woes (and I have several, although I don’t make a big deal of them), are related. And he put me on a few supplements (B and D vitamins) and a couple of new medications about a week ago, and for a week, I noticed no difference. I began to think this was all quackery. Yesterday morning, however, I woke up after eight entire hours of sleep, with an enormously clear head and more energy than I’ve had since I was a sixth grader. A fluke, I thought. My hormones have briefly aligned with Venus, and, by tomorrow, everything will be in retrograde once more.

So, today, I woke up, feeling fine again. How miraculous. This is stunning and wonderful. Hooray! I feel like I can get out there and take those brisk walks that everyone says are so good for you. This is terrific.

I am trying to convince myself that I like my job. I have an odd boss, whom I will write about here from time to time when she does something really odd, which is fairly frequently. The president of this hospice is also a bit of a nut (putting it mildly).

Let me give a couple of examples.

One of my responsibilities for this position was to produce a benefit fundraiser for this organization. Both the president and my boss knew, from the start, that I had never done this before. The two benefit committee cochairs had also never done this before. Once the process started, my boss responded to my requests for guidance with the comment “Oh, you’ll just figure it out.” Basically, we had no help at all from management. In fact, we would make decisions only to be told that “we did it wrong” by those who should have been making suggestions about what we needed to do in the first place. Very frustrating and very traumatic for the two cochairs and I.

One of the things this benefit has always featured is a “Caregiver of the Year” award, which is given to the hospice family who gave spectacular care to their dying loved one. Personally, I find this extremely tasteless. The selection process is downright illegal. Here is what these people normally do: A few months before the benefit, the hospice staff nominate families who they have worked with whom they believe deserve recognition for their caregiving prowess of their now dead relative. They fill out a two or three page form describing the heroics of their particular family as well as the family circumstances.

Then comes the really illegal part.

For those of you who live overseas, the US has a law called HIPAA, which, among other things, ensures that your healthcare records are protected from viewing from everyone except those who must see them in order for you to receive proper care. Everyone in our organization must sign a form stating that we will keep patient/family records confidential in compliance with HIPAA. Our crazy president, however, seems to think that, if you’ve signed the form, you are eligible to go through any file you damn well please—apparently for any reason.

So, these “Caregiver of the Year” award nomination forms get passed out to our BOARD MEMBERS (extremely wealthy society matrons) who have nothing to do with these people’s care, without the knowledge of the caregivers being nominated! And then they vote on who the best caregiver with the most compelling story is. This is so wrong on so many levels.

My hospice turns taking care of dying relatives into a COMPETITION! ICK! Call Tyra Banks! We’ve got “America’s Next Top Caregiver!” Or, maybe this gives a whole new meaning to the show title “Survivor!”

Okay, let’s make it worse now, shall we? While the people who come to this benefit as paying guests are all uberwealthy, multimillionare white folks, the people who have consistently been chosen as recipients of the award are all minorities and living below the poverty level. These folks get trotted out at this “foie gras and champagne” event, are handed an etched glass award, and then the rich folks start bidding on over the top golf outings to Scotland and guided tours of Versailles. All of the money goes to the good cause, but can you imagine being the poor person whose misfortune has just been used to create this bidding frenzy? Can you imagine being so poor that you can’t even afford to buy light bulbs when one burns out, and all of a sudden you’re watching someone bid $2,000 on a bottle of single malt scotch?

Last year, I could honestly plead ignorance about this crass and illegal practice. since nobody told me the “correct” way to get a family for this portion of the fundraiser, I just found a family that had sent us a letter saying how much they appreciated our services and I asked them if they would mind helping us raise funds by coming to our fundraiser and telling their story. They agreed. But the president didn’t like this approach. She wants the “America’s Next Top Caregiver” approach. She says the board member society ladies like to be able to select the Caregiver. Ick.

So, now I’m in a position of having to rat out this practice to the HIPAA authorities, and probably lose my job. Oy.

The first time I did first grade math (which would have been in first grade, of course) I struggled mightily with those cursed signs, because, in my head, I’d draw a semicircle from one point of the angle the long ‘way round to the other point of the angle—and the long way round encompassed a greater amount of space than the teeny angle my teacher was calling “greater than.” So I always got this wrong. Last night, the dreaded words “greater than” and “less than” reappeared in my math lessons. Happy to say, I’ve figured it out since my first first grade experience, but those little signs were the beginning of the end of my grade school mathematics comprehension.