If there's a camera and a drama and a death, those wastes of protoplasm will find a way to be involved.

I'm kind of surprised that I haven't heard about them showing up at anything related to Tyler Clementi.

ION, Social security wants to know if Hubby has been seeing doctors over the past couple of years, to find out if he still qualified for disability. So we went to the hospital and his primary doctors to get printouts of five years of hospitalizations and doctors appointments. We're up to six pages so far, of just single spaced entries of date and place.

I was looking at the hospitals print out, and back in 1988 there's an entry for Maternity.

The nice ladies in the records office all stared in surprise and agreed that that shouldn't be there. "But we can't pull that record to find out what that's about," one said, "because records that old have been destroyed."

We're going to send it all in, and Social Security can just wonder what the hell was going on 23 years ago.

92 tornados today, across 10 states. Dang.

"But we can't pull that record to find out what that's about," one said, "because records that old have been destroyed."

Destroyed? Damn. Why would they do that? I just today went to our records dept. to retrieve charts on some patients who are up for discussion next week, all adults who had been operated on long, long ago. One of the patients was born here in the 1950s, and the chart contained everything straight back to his birth, with all the notes handwritten by MDs and RNs who were clearly in their 50s and 60s themselves and had been taught real fountain-pen penmanship in their childhoods (seventy, eighty years ago, now?).

The operative report my boss needed was there, 45+ years old and typed with a typewriter on onion-skin paper, after all these years both crisp and almost sticky, signed by a doctor my old boss had spoken of as a mentor who'd died long ago when he was young.

It'll all be destroyed eventually, after every page has been digitized. And I suppose there's no need for it, once it's been digitized, but it still feels a waste. All the work of all those hands, telling the story of bringing someone into the world and, bit by bit, patching all the little broken parts back together.

And I can't believe Hubby's hospital didn't even bother to scan it, just went and tossed it all. I give them and their fake maternity records the stinkeye.

I've become unfond of unusual nature patterns.

For reals! He could have a child he doesn't even know about!

For reals! He could have a child he doesn't even know about!

I don't think he was used for bizarre science fiction experiments, though someone may have wanted to play with his genetics, weird as they are.

I didn't think to ask if they'd been digitized, but I suspect not. I'm suspecting some combination of "We're out of space/weird idea about medical privacy/dear god, the storage space costs how much, and these people keep having how many kids?" at work.

out of emotional spoons for the day. goodnight.

Goodnight, msbelle. Hope you get some spoon restorative rest.

Sleep well, and gather more spoons