Checking in

It’s so much more fun when you’re hunting down a bucket of prop wash or the keys to the sea chest, or (my new favorite) some relative bearing grease. A two-page spreadsheet of names, extensions, and building numbers hardly competes. And I get lost in buildings with mazes of cookie-cutter cubicles, circular hallways, extraneous doors, and mirror-image stairwells. I keep looking for frame numbers and wondering what traffic pattern I should follow.

The last two days have been a mind-numbing parade of hellos, handshakes, and repetitions of why the hell I’ve showed up at the unit without a job. (The petty officers are amused, the chiefs and warrants concerned with how I’m coping emotionally, the junior officers secretly excited that I’ll lessen their workload, and the senior folks overjoyed at the prospect of a wayward JO for random tasking and special projects. Several units and divisions have already tried to poach me, including one that offered admittance to a group Indiana Jones screening and a dessert taste-test contest - both in progress at the time - to sweeten the deal.)

Amidst all this revelry, I’ve made multiple trips to the Coast Guard clinic to check in with various folks, explain myself, make yet more copies of my medical record, negotiate with Tricare (military insurance), and keep pushing for staging appointments. I received an official referral to UCSF Medical Center; they are currently reviewing my medical history. By Monday, UCSF should be ready to schedule me in – I heard rumors that appointments could take weeks, but luckily the Tricare liaison shortcut that for me.

Everyone I’ve met has been uniformly helpful and supportive, even if their enthusiasm is sometimes misplaced, like the one person who empathetically listed all his relatives who had been diagnosed with cancer…only to point out that most of them had died soon afterward.

The pragmatic base chaplain said today that he’s intrigued to see what my “faith journey” will be throughout this process. Well. That’s a topic for a whole different post.