Part 2 of this occasional series told the story of Wonderful Wife, an X-ray, a long hallway, and an extra charge.  Part 1 of this occasional series told the story of Dauntless Daughter and a stray cat in the intermountain west. Part three starts with a TNTTB — a teacher new to the building.

I am a science teacher.  I’ve been fortunate to work in the same building, at a school I helped open, for twenty-two years.  Recently my school was fortunate enough to hire an experienced physics teacher.  She had left the profession to be a full-time mom to her two daughters (who are adorable). This year is the first year her kids are in all-day school, my boss knew her, pitched the job and she took it.  And while nobody knows how good a teacher will be before seeing her or him with kids, this teacher looks like a keeper.

I met with her a couple of times before the school year so she could begin to wrap her brain around our physics equipment.  In chemistry, a beaker is a beaker.  Physics is different.  There are lots of toys used to teach the same concepts.  Oftentimes those toys are different from school to school and oftentimes they are expensive and time-consuming to set up.  In physics, seeing is a necessary first step to lesson design.

One thing our TNTTB (yes — a normal person would call her a new teacher — but she isn’t. She is a teacher new to the building.  The distinction matters in all sorts of ways) was excited about was the bowling ball pendulum and Newton Cradle a previous teacher had installed. I got a step stool and started moving tiles in the drop ceiling to find it.  One of the tiles wedged.  There was some pushing and reaching and overhead stretching but eventually I got the tile down, followed by the cables.  I attached the bowling balls and all was good in the world.

The next day I woke with some pain in my right shoulder. Over the course of the day, the pain intensified. Using a computer mouse was difficult.  The pain was distracting on the ride home (I bike commute).  I had to take OTC pain medication to sleep. 

This went on for a few days before I did a little internet research and discovered my symptoms were consistent with a rotator cuff tear. I called my health care provider to make an appointment.  The earliest I could get in was a week after the initial incident. Then I went to my principal to explain what had happened and to get his preference on days I might miss if surgery was warranted.  He pointed me toward our financial office to start the process of a workers’ compensation claim. That’s when the fun began.

I called the company to make the first report of injury.  Based on my symptoms the nurse told me to ice the affected area and to see a provider within 24 hours.  On the day of the call, my appointment was 48 hours away.  Is that soon enough I asked.  It was. Yay.

On the morning of my appointment, I received an email with a workers comp case number and contact information for the workers’ comp employee who was managing my case. My provider took X-rays and nothing was broken or torn. She prescribed physical therapy.  I called the PT to schedule a visit and was told that, since this was a workers comp claim, I could not schedule any appointments until my workers' compensation insurance company approved my provider's prescription. Frustrating.

Meanwhile, my employer’s workers’ comp insurance company sprang into action with….snail mail. They mailed me a copy of my first report of injury with a form to fill out which oddly, asked a lot of questions that were already answered on the first report of injury which was included with the form. It asked other questions too — like, “Have you contacted an attorney?”

I filled out the form and returned it.  A couple of days later I got another form asking for my medical history including the question, “List every injury you have ever had.”  I’m closer to 60 than 50.  I've had my share of injuries. I'm not sure I remember them all. I fell down a 40’ telephone pole once.  That’s a good story. Not sure what the workers’ comp folks would have done with, “creosote soaked splinters, 100, removed from chest and forearms. The form also asked in anyone had witnessed the injury.  Lots of questions...some of them quite unrelated to care.

Wonderful Wife hurt her back at work moving a patient a few years ago.  She knew more about the system than I did.  She suggested ignoring the second form which I did. And after three weeks, the PT called me to schedule my first visit.

Why three weeks?  Why snail mail?  Why ask the same questions?  I don’t know but it felt like two things were happening:

Two tactics but the strategy was the same:  To avoid paying for the costs associated with fixing my hurt shoulder.  Which, under a health care system governed by the profit motive makes a lot of sense.  But it's also a stupid mechanism for delivering care.

The whole process took three weeks of work by me, my provider, an employee at my PT’s office, and at least two, but probably more employees of the Workers’ Compensation insurance provider.  That’s a lot of time and money wasted — and I still hadn’t received any care.

Even after 8 visits to my physical therapist were approved, the care was…weird.  Because the Workers’ comp insurance company was paying the bill, the focus was not on healing my shoulder. The focus was on healing my shoulder only as it related to my specific job duties. In this respect being a chemistry teacher really paid off.  I have to lift gallons of distilled water off high shelves.  I have to reach the top of the whiteboard (oh how I miss chalk). I have to stretch past another student to prevent her lab partner from pouring acid on her.  Or something like that.  All that lifting and reaching and stretching resulted in robust physical therapy which has me fully functional again.  If I had been an English teacher I suppose the therapy would have been exercising with a computer mouse and not one bit more. 

When someone gets hurt at work, there should be a report and probably some investigation by a third party.  But that third party should not be a corporation with a financial stake in denying care. If we had the universal coverage medicare-for-all provides, I could have started my PT earlier. My PT could have focused on a wider range of exercises designed to heal me rather than being restricted in scope to the therapy needed to return me to “functioning cog” status so that my employer could have access to my labor. Under medicare-for-all fewer people would have had to be paid — like those employees for the workman’s compensation insurance provider.  And while nobody believes medicare-for-all would be cheap, I bet my employer wouldn’t mind not having to pay workers’ compensation insurance premiums.

Overall, medicare for all would have been no muss and no fuss. 

And that’s why I want medicare for all.