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You know it’s bad when the doctor calls you to make an appointment.

When I had Kaiser, I had doctors who never wanted to see me. When I had a PPO, I never wanted to see the doctors, because I knew it was pay-as-you-go until I hit my deductible. Unfortunately, the doctors wanted to see me every five minutes. My experience in the UK has been, thus far, that doctors are fairly indifferent to my existence. I wait the requisite six to eight weeks for a specialist — and all of my doctors are now specialists, after the stupid oh-oops-you-don’t-have-asthma-we’re-treating-with-major-steroids-it-was-a-bacterial-infection-oops-there-goes-your-heart-my-bad incident — and I have a single appointment where the doctor says, “Yeah. Keep taking that medicine the American doctors prescribe. And then a peaceful year and a half goes by, where we mutually ignore each other, and only the secretary at the surgery knows I’m alive, since I call to re-up my scrips every month.

But lately, I’ve been feeling… I don’t know. American doctors say all kinds of crap, and one of their favorites is, “your (insert body part) will never be right again. You’ll need to take this medication forever.” I’m wondering if that’s true. I’m wondering if I can’t at least negotiate that “forever” word. How do I even know if this is doing me any good? Okay, I haven’t dropped dead, but a lot of people haven’t dropped dead. I need more proof.

So. I’d been pondering maybe thinking about seeing a nurse, making her talk to a doctor, hope someone could consider at least changing my meds, taking down some dosages, maybe allowing me to get up in the morning without feeling like a geriatric reject taking a handful of pills. Someday, I will be old, and this seems like too long a rehearsal for the real thing.

But, God, I hate doctors. I hate the techs in the hospital — they’re all so small here, short, and I feel huge and American and ungainly and …scared. It takes so much work to change things, so much of feeling like crap while the Powers That Be fiddle with the chemicals they’re pumping into me. God, is it worth it? Or, was my answer when the nurse phoned?