Hurricane Jill

It’s hot out, and this looks remarkably like a handbasket

I’m finally almost out of the pharmacist business entirely. I have a medical job right now doing Medicare H&Ps. It’s fun, and interesting in that I like talking to people, and you never know what kind of person you’re going to meet. The downside is that it’s all house calls, and you never know what their house is going to be like, either. Though what bothers me most is the indoor temperature, far more than the dirt/cleanliness factor.

Old people seem uniformly to like their houses around 80 degrees, which is about 6 degrees hotter than I can bear when I’m sitting around doing nothing, and 10-15 degrees hotter then I can stand when examining patients. And it’s generally >100 degrees here in the daytime, with my air-conditioned car as the only refuge. So lately I’ve been dressing in sandals and flowy skirts and T-shirts, which is 10x cooler than the pants and thin cotton sweaters that made up my professional attire up to now. I look like a hippie, but no one seems to mind. People are happy to have a real doctor COME TO THEIR HOUSE and spend AN ENTIRE HOUR with them, and aren’t going to quibble about style in the face of such substance.

They routinely tell me that I’ve spent more time with them than their regular doctor ever has, even cumulatively over the course of all their visits. Which is a sad commentary on how thoroughly our current payment structure has impeded good medical care with its payment for documentation as a proxy for time and complexity.

Anyway, this assignment ends soon. Hopefully there will be another afterward, or else my residency search will finally yield results.