Day 363

I had to do my pre-admission check-in for my surgery tomorrow at Medical City. Not surprisingly, this ate up a big chunk of my day. It's a total mystery to me why there isn't a master patient database somewhere that all these doctors could just subscribe to. Everyone asks you exactly the same questions, over and over again. Yes, I had knee surgery back in college, but I certainly don't remember who the doctor was. Yes, I take blood pressure medication, but don't ask me to spell the name of the pill. Why do they give drugs names like Pantoprazole and Propranolol anyway? Nobody can spell words like this. Most people can't even pronounce them correctly. And then there are the questions like "Do you have religious beliefs that would cause you to refuse treatment?" Uh, if I did I probably wouldn't be sitting here in this chair talking to you. The one that always gets me is "Have you been to this hospital before?" Jeez, all this paperwork you're collecting and you don't even know if I've been here before. What do you do with this paperwork anyway?

At some point during the afternoon, a nurse handed me some papers and asked me if everything looked correct. "What's this number mean?" I asked her. "Is this my cholestrol level?" She gave me this deadpan look and said, "No John, that number is your age."

When I got back to the office, I had all sorts of little website problems to fix. One of my clients was having their Grand Opening today. I've been hoping to get the details about the Grand Opening for several weeks now, but never was able to get any answers. Left to my own devices, I just changed the main page to say "Now Open for Business." That ought to cover things for a day or two. Another client wanted me to shoehorn five pages of information into a single nested table cell. Needless to say, this broke the layout apart. I don't think I'm ever going to design a website using nested tables again. Nobody wants to edit their content to fit neatly inside these tables anymore. They'd rather have their site function like a sprawling Facebook wall that scrolls down forever. Personally, I think this looks messy, but what do I know?

I made the mistake of eating a big dinner tonight, mostly because I knew I wouldn't be able to eat anything tomorrow. Now I feel drowsy. I should never eat a big dinner. A big breakfast usually puts me in a productive mood for the entire day. A big dinner just puts me to sleep.

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