I decided to go back to the doctor on Wednesday because of both the injury to my chest area and my continued coughing and chest congestion. My regular doctor is out of the office on leave right now, so I've been seeing other doctors in the practice. The one I saw Wednesday was upbeat about my coughing situation, saying he thought it should run its course in a few more days. He ordered a chest X-ray to determine whether something's broken in my ribcage/sternum area. My doctor's office has its own X-ray lab, so getting an X-ray is usually a quick and simple process there. Unfortunately, the office's in-house X-ray technician had left for the day (even though it wasn't even noon yet), so the doctor had to send me up the street to the minor emergency diagnostic center that's owned by the same corporation that owns his practice. When I got there I found myself in line behind a couple of people, so I ended up sitting in the waiting room for nearly an hour. Finally they got me in and out of the lab, and so all that was left was for them to send the image back to the doctor I had seen, and for him to call me to discuss the results.
Thursday came and went with no call from the doctor. So Friday morning I called his office, and when I got their voice mail I left a message asking them to remind him that he owed me a call. By mid afternoon Friday I hadn't heard a word, so I called again and got a person on the phone this time. The person told me that because it was after 3 PM, the doctor would most likely not call me until Monday.
And so I'm pretty angry with my doctor's office right now. The nicest thing I can say about this doctor is that he's not the first I've met for whom customer service is not a high priority. The upshot is that I'm refraining from paddling this weekend because I still don't know if something is broken in my chest area. It's frustrating, but maybe it's not the worst thing for me at this moment. Seeing as how I'm still not entirely recovered from that illness I had, maybe I just need to chill out for a few more days and give my body a chance to get right again.
My friend Amelia, with whom I paddled up at the Gauley last month, paid me a visit Thursday because she was in this area as part of a job. The main reason I bring this up is that she lives in east Tennessee and works for one of the rafting companies on the Pigeon River, one of the rivers that flooded catastrophically a week ago, and she shared some first-hand information on what's happening over there. Her raft company is located on the bank of the Pigeon in the town of Hartford, pretty much all of which was badly flooded. Flood-driven debris knocked a hole in a wall of her company's building, and a lot of the gear was washed away. The whole place was filled with mud, and the building was destabilized and will need structural repair. The good news, said Amelia, is that the entire community--neighbors, church groups, raft guides, everybody--came out and started helping one another as soon as the floodwaters had receded. She said it took just a few hours to get all the mud scraped out of the building, and the company even recovered some of its rafts from a little ways downstream.
Hartford is just one of the towns that experienced major flooding. A few towns were all but washed off the map. If I'm interpreting what I've seen in photos correctly, the entire business district of Chimney Rock collapsed into the Rocky Broad River, and many buildings in the town of Marshall were completely destroyed by the flooding French Broad. The common thread in every town that got flooded appears to be mud: a thick layer of mud contaminated with a whole cocktail of pollutants including petroleum products and raw sewage. Every street must be scraped of that stuff to be passable for cars like my little Toyota Corolla.
Water and electricity are out all over the region, and it's going to take a long time to get them up and running again because the roads must be rebuilt/repaired before the utility trucks can get in to replace damaged lines.
So it's a mess over there. I'm grateful for all the organizations, from FEMA to local governments to nonprofits to individuals with skills and equipment, who are over there helping with the cleanup. If you can't offer help in person, I hope you'll consider donating some money as long as you're smart about it. So far I've donated to several people or entities who are known to me first- or second-hand.
For more information on what this blog is about, click here.
No comments:
Post a Comment