My patients stole my phone August 26, 2007

When I wasn’t looking. I had placed it on the doctor’s desk and then it was gone. I’m not sure who did it. Maybe someone was pissed about having to wait too long. That’s when my usual job satisfaction becomes a bit confused, as I think to myself, “the people I am healing are stealing from me.” It just doesn’t seem right. It was a nice phone, a Mobil Dash, with my and Tim’s picture on the screen, a large file of other photos I’ve taken, mostly of the dog, but also some resident pics, scenic shots. My medical programs. All my numbers. Some outlook contacts. Now I’ll never email that woman from Harvard who sends residents to Iraq.

My patient composition today: I quickly think of the Cantonese speaking man who had a piece of iron in his eye. I imagine how scared he was when I came at his eyeball with a needle to scrape it out. He waited a long, long time but when he left, he left with a smile, thanking me through his wife, said I was very nice. It was my first time removing anything from the cornea. Awesome.

A polish lady had a urinary tract infection (in addition to a million other complaints of “total body dolor” which should be changed to “total body bol”), a real and uncomfortable problem. All the other patients I saw today were fine and didn’t even need to be in the hospital. One guy, after being hit on the leg with a bat, was sent from his substance abuse shelter for medical clearance. He brought all he owns with him, including 2 large cardboard signs “What’s the best nation? (turn sign over) Donation” and “Don’t worry, I’m not going to clean your windshield.” One of the most rude and entitled people I have ever met came in today because of her neck muscle spasm, insisting on immediate care “this is the emergency room” (it wasn’t, it was urgent care, and she didn’t have an emergency). A kid with an abscess that had to be seen again after I drained it yesterday. A guy who needed sutures out.

And this I don’t understand. Our technician (the almost nurse, who cleans the rooms, brings patients in) left around noon today. ???? No one knows what their hours are supposed to be. They just leave without telling anyone.

The woman I was working with had an HIV+ patient spit in her eye and she had to figure out if she should start prophylaxis. FYI, apparently risk of transmission in that case is next to zero.

Came home, ate a can of herring in mustard sauce for dinner (along with 1 whole tomato, a bag of nuts, 3 slices of polish cheese, 1 medium sized carrot, in that order). Talked to my brother on Skype.

Top 3 favorite things about today:

1. removing the piece of iron from that dude’s eye

2. gossiping with the NP I worked with today – she’s been there 15 yrs and has all the dirt

3. the herring. it was really, really good. God, I’m so Polish.

What sucked:

1. Tim’s away

2. No more phone

3. My hair dye job did not go as planned. Hopefully to be corrected tomorrow.

Why we love the fire department August 24, 2007

As I write this, there is a team of firefighters outside and inside our apartment building, 228 E 26th. They came less than 3 minutes after being called by Rocky, our super. Rocky is Albanian and when he doesn’t want to be understood, he exaggerates his accent, mumbles, and gives answers to unasked questions: in short, is totally incomprehensible. Tonight, he did not want to be understood. We called him early this evening to tell him our bathroom is flooding. 3 hours later when he finally arrived to inspect the problem, he said “I shabailalh couldn’t get of fobalroaldo.” From the ceiling, a large steady stream of water was spraying all over the front of the bathroom while the ceiling in the back of the bathroom bubbled with water tension. It was getting worse and worse. We all knew the problem was the apt above us. The guy upstairs “is crazy,” gets drunk, and floods his apartment somehow. Last time this happened we were in Australia, 2 months ago. Both times, all the apartments below 5A, all the way to 1A, were soaked.

Tonight, no one was home in 5A. Rocky had no key. He tried to get in through our fire escape but no go. Then we heard a lot of banging and drilling. About a 1/2 hr later, Rocky, covered in sweat from head to toe came down to announce it was impossible to try to break in through the 5A door. During all this time, we had been thinking, “CALL THE FIRE DEPARTMENT.” They are around the corner, get very excited about this kind of stuff (I know from experience, keep reading), and can get into and through anything with their thieving tools. 5 minutes later, 26th street was lit up with red and white lights and sirens. Very well-equipped firemen were now flooding our stairwell.

Fast forward about 10 minutes. The door is down and apparently, the culprit is the toilet in 5A. So we have toilet water flowing down our bathroom walls, into our bathtub, sink, and covering our floors. (By the way, the picture to the left is of the firemen breaking the door down, with Super Rocky in the extreme foreground looking on in humiliation.)

The last time I called the fire department was about 8 months ago when I locked myself out. I had been informed earlier by our heroin-dealing 65 year-old lady neighbor that the fire department provides locksmithing services and if I ever lock myself out, I should just call them because they will do it for free. Sure enough, they brought out the massive fire truck full of men and climbed up my fire escape. Although I didn’t know it at the time, I apparently didn’t know which window was mine and they nearly broke into my next door neighbor’s house. Finally, they got the right window and were in, letting me in. It was amazing.

The fire department also came to our wedding. At some point during the cake cutting, the fire alarm went off and teams of firemen stormed into the backhallways of our church hall reception site. Since we were busy cutting cake, we thought the flashing white lights were cameras flashing and missed the whole thing.

Anyway, we love the NYFD. Nicest, most willing, most capable bunch of guys we’ve ever met. Thought we would share our sense of gratitude, especially since today 2 firefighters were injured cleaning up the fire that killed 2 fire fighters last weekend at the Deutsche Bank building near the WTC site.

What’s with this city? (Part I) August 13, 2007

I want everyone out there to know that apparently, in New York City, it is perfectly o.k. to go through the garbage, regardless of your socio-economic status. I can’t count how many times I have walked out my front door and seen some quasi-to-fully respectable looking individual ripping open white plastic trash bags to get a good luck at the crap I threw out the night before.

I’ve been meaning to take a lot of pictures with my camera-phone to document this, but so far all I’ve got is this one, and I’ll admit that the perp does look at least mildly homeless. But I’m pretty sure he isn’t… he had decent shoes on.

Anyway, there are two guys I see doing it most often (it seems to be mostly a male thing). One wears a belt, a tucked in shirt, and pretty nice loafers. The other is in an electrical wheelchair, and always has a little lap dog with him. It’s a yorkshire terrier with it’s hair done up in a vertical ponytail. Pretty cute stuff. Maybe the guy is just out feeding his dog. I really can’t tell.

In fact, maybe they are just curious. I don’t see these guys carrying around bulging bags of secret treasure. It could be that they just want to read my cable bill and see if I ordered any dirty movies on demand last month. It’s possible, I suppose.

But no, I know that people do take the trash. As an experiment, I threw away a camera that I accidentally dropped (and destroyed) in the Atlantic Ocean. Packed it nicely within its original box, and set it on top of a trash can. When I came out 10 minutes later, the pseudo-homeless guy who our superintendent pays to look after the trash area (that’s a whole other story) was playing with it, and asked me if I knew how to turn it on. I told him it was broken, but he just looked at me suspiciously before tucking it away god-knows-where.

And then today, as I was walking home from the gym, I saw a 50-year old man wearing a nice button-down blue and white stripe shirt, black suit pants, slightly scuffed but otherwise respectable oxfords, and a nice leather belt bent over in the middle of the street. As I got closer, I realized that he was spending about 15 seconds wrestling a coin that had sunk into the melted tar in the middle of the street. Finally he stood up, triumphant, holding his tar-covered prize. I wondered to myself, is this some rare 1934 penny that the tar had kept in mint condition for decades? Maybe it was at least a Sacajawea or Susan B. Anthony dollar coin. I passed him and shook my head – it was a quarter. And a quarter that no parking meter, coinstar machine, or bodega clerk would want anything to do with.

This all confirms my belief that NYC takes in plenty of normal people every year, and does one of two things to them. It either spits them back out to the midwest/suburbs/country-of-origin, or turns them into mean/freakish/crazy/outrageous urban denizens.
In the end, though, this really is a pot-kettle-black post. As my eyes scan the living room right now, I notice a few things. For starters, the Ikea coffee table my laptop is resting on was not purchased – it was “rescued” from the sidewalk by my ever-resourceful wife. The antique trunk that the T.V. sits on: found on the sidewalk. The air conditioner we finally threw out a few weeks ago because it was a P.O.S.: same. The end table next to the couch, the desk that took up too much space in the living room, both street treasures that Ania considered to be great value.

On a completely unrelated note, I’ve been suffering from this strange itch for the last several months that just won’t go away…

Welcome to Hell (please take a number) August 4, 2007

Fair warning: this post is more personal therapy than entertainment, but if someone else can profit from my misery, than there is perhaps at least a modicum of justice in this world.

So this week I had my tail up… I was feeling ambitious, and ready to tackle the beast.  The beast of NYC bureaucracy, that is.  For a long time now, Ania and I have had a rather unorthodox (read: illegal) automotive situation, from a “license, registration, and insurance” point of view.  To wit: until recently, my driver’s license was from Illinois, while Ania’s was from New Jersey.  Ania lived in New York, and I was in school in New Hampshire.  Our car had New Jersey plates and registration, but was insured in New Hampshire.  To add to the excitement, our inspection sticker and Ania’s license both expired in February, and have not yet been renewed.  The car’s registration gave up the ghost in March, and that is really where this story begins.

Now that we are both full-time NYC residents for the foreseeable future, it seemed a good time to streamline our documentation, as it were.  To that end, I made the trek to License X-Press at 34th and 8th on Wednesday.  Despite being told by NYC.gov that all I needed was my IL license to trade in, it turned out I actually needed that, plus my Social Security card and U.S. Passport.  No matter.  A few cab rides later and I was the proud new owner of a decidedly shady little piece of paper claiming that I was indeed licensed to operate motor vehicles in the Empire State, and 49 others.  While I had intended to re-register the car in New York that day as well, I began to get a grip on reality when the clerk at License X-Press handed me a sheaf of papers listing ~10 requirements for doing so.  These included (but were not limited to) proving that I either paid NY State Tax on the vehicle or was exempt from doing so, presenting the original title, having a valid and recent NY State inspection certificate, and actually being the person listed on the title (I am not).  So I took the decision to regroup – Rome was not built in a day, after all.

Fast forward 20 hours.  It is 11am, and I awake Thursday morning to the immediate realization that I was supposed to move my car for alternate-side parking (which, by the way, is one of the most nefariously ingenious civic revenue generation schemes ever hatched).  Shit – another $65 ticket.  Well, I thought to myself, at least it’s still cheaper than parking in a garage.  I take Rio for her morning walk, my eyes scanning the line of cars to see if mine has a ticket.  I scan again, and then try to remember whether I moved the car since parking it directly in front of our apartment.  No…  Shit – either it’s stolen or towed.  I begin to wonder which one would be less of a hassle to deal with.  On the one hand, if it’s towed, I get to keep all the camping equipment I had left inside.  On the other hand, it being towed means that I have to venture forth into the belly of the beast – the tow pound – wherever that may be.

Now I have a theory, probably bogus but a theory nonetheless, that if you really want to feel the beating heart of a great metropolis, you need to have your car towed and deal with the consequences.  For instance, when this happened to me in Chicago, I got to go subterranean into what used to be some kind of slaughterhouse/railyard/gilded age center of industry that has since been covered with skyscrapers and a nine-hole golf course.  That experience spoke volumes about bureaucracy in the city of big shoulders insofar as they did not accept credit cards, yet the nearest ATM was above ground and down the street in an Omni hotel.  Another aspect of my theory is that the tow pound is one of the last bastions of a true democracy.  No animals are more equal than any other there.  If you are a millionaire and your car is stuck there and you do not have a notarized letter from your wife saying that you have her permission to pick up her car, under whose name it is titled, you have lost your place in line to a drunk guy who has all his papers and will be allowed to drive right out onto the westside highway.  Stultefying bureaucracies and death are the last great equalizers that I can think of.

So here’s what happened.  To retrieve the car from the tow-pound (located in a similarly dead industrial relic, Pier 76 at 38th and 12th), I gathered my passport, the only copy of the car’s title I could find, my new scrap of paper/driver’s license, our marriage license, my high school diploma, and a box of lucky charms, and hailed a cab to the pier.

Since brevity is the soul of wit, and this therapy post is proving actually quite painful (I think I needed more time), I will re-cap the next three hours.  I hand over my documentation.  45 minutes later, they tell me I can’t have my car.  I ask why not.  They say because my NJ registration is expired.  I say, well I can’t exactly drive to NJ and get it renewed.  They say, then get it registered in NY.  I say, I would, except a prerequisite for that is to get the car inspected.  They say, mmm hmm.  I ask them if they have ever read the book Catch-22.  They say NEXT.

Because here’s the thing.  To get my car our of the pound, I need a valid registration.  To get a valid registration, I need an inspection certificate.  Since they do not inspect cars for you at the tow pound, I need to get my car out of there in order for it to be inspected.  Good times.

Well, enough drama.  Yesterday Ania and I made 3 more visits to DMV-related offices, got a 10-day inspection waiver, went to the tow pound, unscrewed our Jersey plates (R.I.P.), and surrendered them to the cashier at the pound.  Throwing the shiny new New York ones onto the dash, and $400 lighter, we saved our car from the mortuary at Pier 76.

Of course, the car still has to pass inspection, which it probably won’t since the check engine light comes on every time I go over a speed bump, and Ania still needs to get her NY License, which can only happen if we can find her original Soc. Sec. card (no copies please).  I can’t wait to start work if this is what vacation is like.