Yup, it was all about extracting the most $$$ from my insurance company.
contrapoint, and i don’t disagree with
@FractalAudio often, but:
when dealing with things that might be matters of life and death, it’s really useful to get an accurate diagnosis before treating the condition.
10 years ago, i changed careers from systems administration to veterinary medicine because i wanted to feel like i make a difference, and people are gross. i have worked in surgical specialty teams for the last 4 years, and currently lead one. this story is about something that happened yesterday.
in both fields, it is my experience that most of the user reports i get about what’s wrong are completely unrelated to the actual issue (first rule, check the cables). for example: i have an appointment on tuesday for “hip arthroscopy”, despite the fact that there are no conditions of the canine hip that are treated arthroscopically, and a 30 second perusal of the record shows that the problem is with the patient’s ankle.
yesterday, i showed up to find that we had an appointment for a swollen salivary gland that had been booked overnight. the owner had been promised by their regular vet that the surgery could happen the same day (with no knowledge of our schedule) and that it would cost a couple thousand dollars. the patient arrived, bleeding from its mouth from a soft ball sized tumor under its tongue, and breathing like darth vader. it was a nervous german shepherd, so we were unable to examine its mouth without sedating it.
it costs us thousands of dollars every time we use our CT scanner, because that’s how the lease is structured. there is no other way to have access to a CT scanner. general electric owns all of them, and when they age out of the human medical industry, we have the opportunity to rent them. ours runs IRIX on a Fscking Octane. (
@unix-guy will understand how old it is)
we were fully booked, but rescheduled our one elective surgery of the day (no doubt we’ll receive a terrible yelp review) and scheduled the patient for a CT so we could determine exactly what was wrong so that we would have some idea what surgery was necessary. while i was warming up the CT machine, the patient stopped breathing and we had to perform CPR.
@FractalAudio - you’re really lucky that your self diagnosis was accurate, and that it was something that could be easily treated by your general practitioner. i have seen way too much death from poor diagnosis, and from people that think that their expertise in one field makes them experts in all other fields.
please have patience with people who know more than you do about how your preamp, or ears, or dog works than you do. please follow their recommendations so that you don’t have to have more surgery because the dog “doesn’t like” it’s cone and eats the sutures, or you blow up the USB board on your AXEFX.
I have done way too many unsuccessful CPRs this year, this month, this week to have any sympathy for you having to wait a little bit to make sure you dont have life threatening cancer in your ears.
with you.