Adventures in Medical Bureaucracy

I'm afraid of becoming just another tool in a vast, convoluted and highly inefficient machine called health care. A great big tool.

I had to go to BU's Student Health Services to get an ear infection treated last week. First thing they had me do was get an MMR - because apparently different offices of BU don't share important student documentation, like their immunization records. So I wasted 20 minutes standing in line with international students for a vaccine which I later found out I was already up-to-date on.

Then they had me wait in the clinic for another 5 minutes for the doctor to prescribe that my ear be washed with a saline-water solution (apparently, it wasn't an infection, my ear canal was just clogged with wax). So I waited another 20 minutes in a clinic, which afterwards the nurse practitioner doused my ear canals with cold saline solution that while cleaned my ears put a lot of cold pressure on my ear drums and lead to me being dizzy, disoriented, and somehow on a bus going to Chestnut Hill.

The moral of this story: don't use Q-tips in the ear canals.