Love the Kindle Paperwhite. My only wish is that it was easier to (or, indeed, realistically possible to legally) get UK editions of books where I know they've Americanized the text.

My paperbacks take up a lot of space and I can't read them in the dark.

I love my Kindle Paperwhite. I've got one setting for when I'm wearing glasses and another for bedtime with a much larger font and an appropriate background.

Mom just had the worst phone call from Hospice. The woman was completely unhelpful and multiple times called my aunt "your mom" instead of your sister. The person from the hospital and the other person from hospice all indicated that Aunt W was eligible to go to in patient hospice because of how bad the situation is.

But this woman...she chuckled ...at the "misunderstanding" and said that couldn't happen because in patient isn't where someone goes to live. And would ask where the family thought my aunt would go after...um. the funeral home. She kept saying there was criteria but never said what the criteri was. And at one point mentioned that yes an assessment had been done on my aunt....she had done it. And then made no recommendations and when mom asked what should she do the lady kept saying "the family decides" and then got frustrated when mom said she didn't feel she had enough information.

I am so pissed. Mom had the phone on speaker and I wanted to jump in and say " we need to know what your recommendation is and what the criteria are for in patient and if you can't give us that info then we need to talk to someone else."

I'll be here tomorrow and I'm not leaving until she talks to the case manager at the hospital and I want to know if they have any records of a hospice assessment.

Mom does not need to deal with this.

I have no recs for Kindle. I use the app on my phone.

Libby is great for delivering books right to kindle.

Askye that’s horrible. Your poor mom.

Oh, that's shitty, askye.

My favorite Library Books on the Kindle not-a-feature is that if you turn on airplane mode, the books don't autoreturn, so you can get some extra time to finish.

Oh, no, askye, I'm so sorry!

My favorite Library Books on the Kindle not-a-feature is that if you turn on airplane mode, the books don't autoreturn, so you can get some extra time to finish.

Ooh, I'll have to try that next time I'm running out of time on a library book. (I use Kindle on my iPad for books I'm reading for the first time, and on my phone for comfort rereads, of which I always have at least one going. I didn't ever plan this distinction, but somehow fell into it.)

Ugh, askye, that's horrible.

So this morning I was supposed to have my mammogram. Some of y'all may remember that the pathology report from my breast reduction back in January turned up various atypical and possibly precancerous cells (atypical lobular hyperplasia, focal flat epithelial atypia, and atypical lobular hyperplasia). I discussed this with my surgeon and the breast clinic at the hospital where I had my surgery (Virginia Mason) and we agreed that an appropriate plan going forward would be to continue with annual mammograms, but add a second type of testing (probably ultrasound), probably six months after the mammogram for a belt-and-suspenders type approach in hopes of catching anything cancerous at an early stage.

This was supposed to start with a mammogram 6 months after my surgery. Now, almost all of my hospital-connected medical care, including my annual mammograms, has been at UWMC-Northwest, which is super close to my house, rather than Virginia Mason, which is not. The only reason I ended up at VM for the breast reduction was that UWMC plastic surgery wasn't accepting new patients for the procedure at that time. I decided to go back to UWMC because for anything ongoing I'd rather have the place that's 5-10 minutes from my house and doesn't involve wrestling with downtown Seattle traffic, thank you very much.

Unfortunately this requires the always-chancy handoff between two different medical systems! But I thought I had things under control. I called back in May to make my appointment, and I told the scheduler at the time that I had these pathology results from VM, and that my care plan was going to need to be revised accordingly. He went ahead and scheduled the mammogram, and I figured I'd discuss it with the UWMC breast clinic folks at the time and talk about scheduling an ultrasound for January and so on.

But then when I got there this morning and described the situation, they decided they couldn't do my mammogram, because I was scheduled for a screening mammogram, and I needed a diagnostic one. Which they not only couldn't do then and there, they couldn't even SCHEDULE it without having VM send over my pathology results--my pulling up the PDF from my phone wasn't good enough. They promised to follow up with VM and call me later, and oh by the way they're already scheduled out through the end of August for diagnostic mammograms.

I was already on the verge of tears out of sheer frustration (and fear, too, because the tech who'd been going to do my exam said something like "this makes you much higher risk!"), but I didn't want to lose it there in the clinic in front of the staff and other patients, so I went and sat in the outpatient building lobby and found a relatively quiet spot to cry and text Dylan. I mentioned to him that I wished that there was someone there I could talk to, like an on-call chaplain or counselor who could help me calm down, or even that I could go back into the clinic and just get a better sense of what was going on and how concerned I should be about the delay. He encouraged me to do exactly that, so I did. They were very nice about it and had a couple of radiologists talk to me. After reassuring me that the kind of delay I was looking at wasn't that concerning, given the recency of my surgery and the fact I've always been good about getting my annual mammograms, they took me out to talk to their scheduler to make sure she had everything she needed...

...which is where I discovered that not only did they need the pathology report from VM, they also needed an order from my primary care provider for the diagnostic mammogram. I don't know why the first person I talked to didn't think of that, but if I'd done the stoic thing that I thought I should and not gone back in to ask for more help, who knows how much longer it would've taken me to find out?

Anyway, in between trying to focus at work I wrangled the pathology report out of VM and the referral out of my PCP, and finally late in the afternoon the UWMC scheduler got back to me and was able to get me an appointment on 8/11, only it's at a different location where they had earlier appointments but is just as much of a pain in the ass to get to if I'd just decided to stick with VM for all my boob health needs going forward.

I know all this could be so much worse, but it's still damn frustrating how hard it is to coordinate health care in this country. I tried to do the right thing and communicate what I needed all along, but I still got tripped up by what I didn't know I didn't know.

Susan that is really frustrating. The medical system really does suck.

It's insane. How many people just give up and don't get treated?