A Medical Story

I'm going to post the ending first so that no one reads this and starts to think I am dying.  I'm fine, nothing wrong.  It was a screw-up by my doctor's office.  But I thought something could be badly wrong until I realized what was happening.

The first sign was nearly three weeks ago when I went to work out.  It had been more than a week since I had been to the YMCA, and the elliptical machines were busy, so I went to the gym to shoot baskets.  About ten minutes into shooting, a muscle on the front of my right leg began to tighten and to burn, to the point that I had to stop, sit down and wait for Jackie.  I have had muscle cramps before, but never that muscle.  Still, no big deal.

A week later, I decided to walk to the store for a couple of items.  The store is about a 25-minute walk, so it's good exercise if I have time.  However, by the time I had gone one block, that same muscle started to tighten again, and before I got 1/4 mile, I turned around and limped back to my car.  I couldn't walk that far.  Less than a week later, it happened again when I took Lucas to the University of Washington.  Same muscle.  I struggled through, but I couldn't really walk.

As I have aged, I have given some thought to the disadvantages of growing old.  OK, no disadvantages at all, given the alternative.  But what I mean is, what sorts of effects of aging are bad enough that I will begin to feel that they are really making my life worse?  The first two things on the list are mental deterioration (like Alzheimer's, not like forgetting to shave one day) and being unable to walk, in large part because I want to travel and be able to walk around while I can.  Somewhere after that are things like losing the ability to drive, see reasonably well, or hear.

Anyway, there I was, unable to walk.  In addition, I began to feel very tired.  I developed a cough that stayed too long.  My body just felt wrong, with a lot of little symptoms, and I was afraid that something was seriously wrong, at the same time hoping it was something that could be fixed relatively easily as opposed to, say, kidney failure.  My blood sugar has been good, but diabetes does bad things to you, and I don't know how long I had diabetes before it was diagnosed, so who knew?  So yesterday, I finally went to see a doctor.

Now for a little side trip.  I have gone into a hypothyroid state at least three times before:  once when they were adjusting my dosage after my thyroid was removed, and twice more when I stopped taking thyroid medication for testing purposes.  It sucks, but anyway, I know what it feels like.  I did not know if the muscle problem could be related, but I recognized many of my other symptoms as being consistent with hypothyroidism.  I felt cold.  I had gained 15 pounds quickly.  I felt like crap, very tired.  You get ungodly tired when you don't have thyroid medication, not just regular tired; there's a difference.  I was beginning to lose interest in food and even in anything to drink.

OK, it all seems obvious now, but it didn't seem likely that I could be severely low on thyroxine, because I was taking it every day, same dosage I have taken for two years or more.  The only possibility was that something was wrong with the pills I was taking, which seemed hard to believe.  Nothing had changed except that instead of taking two pills a day, 125 micrograms each, they had finally come up with a 250 microgram pill, so I was only taking one.  Or so I thought.

Did I mention I just got invited to join Mensa? It true.

I went to my doctor's office, and the nurse took my blood pressure, temperature, pulse, all fine.  Then she went through my medications with me.  When she got to thyroxine, it was listed as 25 micrograms.  Not 250.  I told her I thought it was 250.  She said that people get confused between the micrograms and milligrams.  That may be true of "people," but not me, not so much.  I asked her if 25 micrograms was a large dosage.  She said no, it was really tiny.  I do not take a tiny amount of thyroxine, not by anyone's standards.

The only thing is, I have an endocrinologist, and this was my regular doctor.  Only my endocrinologist prescribes thyroxine for me, so it just looked like someone had dropped a zero in their notes.  Still, by that time, the light had finally come on.  Or more like the bright red lights were flashing and the fire alarm was going off.  Could it be that simple?  When the nurse stepped out of the room, I called Jackie and asked her to check the pill bottle.  The pills were .025 milligrams; for those "people" who have trouble with the decimal places, that's 25 micrograms.  I had not looked at the pill bottles closely, and I had been taking one tenth of my thyroxine dosage for a month.

Nice work, Mensa boy.

I happened to be going to the grocery store after my doctor appointment, and my pharmacy is there, so I asked if they could check and see if my prescription had changed substantially.  They looked it up, and they saw that yes, it had dropped by a factor of ten.  How did this happen?  When my regular doctor's office sent in a prescription for my diabetes medicines, they had also prescribed 25 micrograms of thyroxine, and the pharmacy had replaced my old prescription with the new one.  My regular doctor should not be prescribing that medication for me at all, let alone dropping a rather important zero.  He doesn't even test me for that.  Yikes.

The pharmacist was clearly alarmed when he saw what had happened, and give him credit, he jumped all over it.  He told me that my endocrinologist's prescription was still valid, and he said that they would fill it right then.  When I came back for my pills a few minutes later, he admonished me for not paying more attention when something changed.  A fair point.  I was enormously relieved.

I came home and took nine more pills, although it feels wrong to take a handful of prescription pills like that.  I took ten today.  Ten more tomorrow, and they will all be gone, a month's worth in three days, and then I have my 125 microgram pills again.  I am almost back to normal already, though feeling a bit stupid that it took me so long to figure it out.  No lasting harm done.  Still, yikes.

Unemployment Chronicles: The Doldrums

As of tomorrow, it will be one month since the last day I worked.  It has been a week and a half since I last heard anything from any recruiter, and I doubt there will be much activity this week, although I will contact them.  Things are just very, very quiet.

Most likely Thanksgiving has something to do with that.  With luck, companies will start to gear up in December in order to be ready for year end.  I can't say that I have a lot of faith in that possibility, or at least any faith that it will impact me, but it could.  If there is any time of year that companies need accountants, it is year end.  Whether they want someone with my background who wants to get paid well is another matter.

 

My job for now is to contact employers so that I can file for unemployment payments.  And to keep letting my recruiting contacts know that I am still here.

 

I can afford this life of relative leisure for now, but it is not something I could do for years at a time.  I have known people who can make contracting work, but I may not be one of them.  Still, it seems to me just as likely that this work could lead to a permanent job as any other efforts, so there is that potential benefit.  Meanwhile, at least while I am working, I can make enough to get by.

A Different Managing Model

First, about the picture.  I google-imaged "models," and not surprisingly, a lot of pictures like this one popped up, so I just went with it.  Can't be helped.  (Ooh, I just tried "managing models."  Borrring!  This is better.)

Here is a true story about management.  Seven years ago, I was encouraged to apply for a a management position at work.  I had not been expecting or seeking such a thing.  In fact, I had decided that I was only ever going to be a senior-level accountant, and that this would be all right.  I was happy; I was good at it, and I was nearly certain that my abilities would never be doubted.  I could see all the way to my retirement.  Then managers in my department had opportunities to move up, and management suggested to me that I should apply for one of the positions that opened as a result.  It was a challenge, a chance to make more money, and what the company wanted me to do, and at least internally I felt that I was the best candidate, so I didn't hesitate.

But a wiser person than I, whom we shall call "Bill", which may or may not have been his actual name (if in fact it was a he even), asked me why I wanted to do that.  Bill had some credibility in the matter, as he himself was an excellent accountant -- better than I ever want to be -- and could have gone into management had he wanted to, but he chose not to, and instead remained a senior-level accountant for about 35 years.

Why take on the headaches, he asked?  Why deal with all the different stuff they deal with, and all that stress?  Ah Bill, I should have listened.  But the truth is that, despite the BS above about challenge and doing what they expected of me, the money is very, very tempting.  And the other sad but true truth is that I liked being able to say that I was a Manager, with people working for me, and that I had received a promotion to get to that point.  Pride and greed, two of the deadly sins, and in time I paid for my sins.

But back to the point of our story, which is that I received the promotion, and although I was not entirely confident that I could really manage effectively, the transition went more smoothly than I anticipated.  I have little doubt about why it went as well as it did, for awhile, until it didn't anymore:  Bill was working for me the first couple of years.  He made more money than I did, which he deserved, and that was fine with me.  He was more valuable.  I had one other really top-notch employee as well, and it is no coincidence that it was after my job changed and I lost those two employees that things got really difficult.

I can also think of a couple of times in the last ten years that I worked for someone who clearly did not have my level of experience and ability.  The first time really bothered me, until I told my brother about it, and his advice was "Make him look good."  I took that advice to heart, and we worked pretty well together after that.  That person was seen as a perfectly good manager, and he was smart enough to realize that I was helping him, so I did well.  It was not until I was transferred away from him that management began to really see his weaknesses.

All of which leads to a serious question:  If you have five accountants, and you want one of them to become manager of the other four, should you choose the best accountant to be the manager?  Even if the best accountant would also be the best manager, do you want to take the best accountant away from the accounting and have them attending meetings and answering emails instead?  And if you don't choose the best accountant, are you sure that the manager should make more money?

Or engineers, or scientists, or programmers, or teachers.  And yet, despite lip service to some other considerations, in real life the best accountant usually gets the job, in part because the management job almost always pays the most money, so you have to give it to them as reward for their efforts.  And the management jobs have to pay the most because they have the most authority, and getting paid less might undermine their authority.  Still, my experience is that really good people who actually do the work are extremely valuable, and the usual model of forcing those people into management if they want to make more money is probably not very efficient.

One real world model I can think of is the world of sports.  No one thinks it would be a good idea to take the best baseball player on the team, tell them to stop playing, and have them become manager.  And even though the manager is typically paid less than the top players, he is able to maintain authority over them.  It may seem obvious that the things that make a baseball player the best player may not make him the best manager, but the same is clearly true of accountants.  What is considered less with business professionals is the lost productivity associated with taking your best people out of the production flow.  In sports, that would jump right out -- you don't want Albert Pujols filling out lineup cards instead of hitting.

It's something to think about.  I'm pretty sure that I am more valuable as an accountant than I am as   a manager, but I will certainly be paid less to be an accountant.  The market encourages me to do something that will make me less productive, and I will be paid more to contribute less.  There should be a better way.

A Word About Blog Traffic

Historically, my posts have received as many as 60-70 views at the most, never any more. 20-30 is probably more common. However, a post I made in September called "Leaders" has been viewed 231 times according to my blog statistics, and my pre-election October 28 post "What's Wrong With White People?" has been viewed 413 times, with still something like 50 views a day to Politerazzo, many of them to that post

 Something much bigger than my blog is driving people to my blog. Raul shared the post to Facebook, but that was a link to where I posted it on Daily Kos, so I do not know what is going on. I do know that when I googled "What's Wrong With White People?" my Daily Kos diary was the third item on the list, and this blog was the first item on the third page. Still, how many people google that phrase?  No one other than Raul has left a comment, so I cannot tell where all of these pageviews are coming from.

All of which is just interesting.

Speaking of interesting, I was just looking at that picture I pasted up above, and I thought "That looks like some other country", and "That traffic looks really bad."  The picture is attached to a caption that says "The world's largest traffic jam happened last year in China."  Must have been a doozy.

Unemployment Chronicles: Filing for Unemployment

Out in Bethlehem they're killing time,
Filling out forms, standing in line.

Billy Joel, Allentown (of course)

I think that the last time I filed for unemployment was when Joe "someone-has-to be-last-in-their-class-even-at-Harvard"* Marshall fired me back in 1985, although perhaps I filed twelve years ago when I got laid off.  I certainly was entitled, but I don't remember.

I didn't file the day my contract at Robert Half ended, and three days later they had a potential job for me, but that did not pan out, so yesterday I finally filed.

The Robert Half thing was a bit annoying.  Every time I talked to the recruiter, things had progressed a little further.  We sent your resume.  She likes your resume, thinks you'll be perfect.  She needs to get it approved.  We're talking about timing now.  Then, forget it.  It never got approved; it's "dead in the water."

The fortunate thing is that I was already beginning to doubt.  It all sounded too much like the type of progression I would make up to keep someone's hopes alive.  In reality, things don't typically happen in that sort of smooth, linear fashion, moving forward one little step every 2-3 days.  So I was not really surprised.  They don't have anything else in the pipeline right now, so I'm back to contacting my network and looking through job listings.

Next time, if there is a next time, I will file for unemployment on day one.

I have to remember not to expect too much right away.  This whole contracting model is a bit of an experiment.  I have met people who have done it for years, but no one I knew well enough to ask how much they made every year.  It could be that it isn't a good plan for the primary breadwinner.  Or it could be that it's like starting your own business, and it takes some time to get it going.  I'm beginning to think that the most likely outcome is that someday I will start somewhere as a contractor and eventually accept a permanent position.

Next time they add a little blue line to the chart above, I will be one of the 360,000 or so filing a new claim.  It's not a lot of money, but it will be nice to have.

*Thanks Tom -- an unforgetable classic line.

Unemployment Chronicles: Taking a Break

I have never been quite sure why we work as hard as we do.  Not everyone does - people in Italy, which seems to be about average for Europe, work an average of 1,585 hours per year, versus 1,824 for the United States.  That's 240 more for Americans, which as it happens comes out to six weeks every year that we are working and they are not.  We are not the top country in the world in hours worked, just ninth on the list I found, but the point is that in other countries like the UK, Sweden, Switzerland, France, Germany, The Netherlands and others, most people take way more time off than we do, and I bet they like it that way.  I be not many of them wish they could work an extra 4-5 weeks every year and make more money.

 

All of which is an introduction to the point that working for a few months and then taking a break is fantastic.  It would be more fantastic if I knew for sure how long the break would be and that it would in fact end, but you can't have everything.  Meanwhile, I do have this break, and it has been a chance to relax some and to get a few things done.

 

During the last two weeks, I have helped Lucas get his MIT application together by helping edit his essays.  The application was submitted on Halloween, so now it's finished, yay.  Jackie's transmission died last week, and the car won't be ready until next week, so that has been easier because she can use my car while I stay home.  Also, I caught up on all the Boy Scout accounting, and I have spent more time than usual obsessing over politics and polls, writing political pieces for Daily Kos, and reading Game of Thrones, which is just a really long series.  I have also spent a little extra time bugging Jarrod about his schoolwork, which is always a good thing.

 

Admittedly, this is not a particularly lucrative activity.  I'm not getting paid.  But I have worked full-time for a long time before this year, including the last eleven years straight, and perhaps now it is OK to use a little of the cushion that I have built over the years in order to take life easier.  This process is also known as "eating into your retirement savings," which sounds scary, but maybe it's not so scary.

 

 A week ago yesterday, I mentioned a job possibility with Robert Half again.  That one is still on the table; supposedly the client likes my resume, but they need to get approval from on high.  As long as it materializes, everything is good.