Brent McGillis: Time and the seriously injured worker

Thursday, September 21, 2017

Time and the seriously injured worker

 Time, it is billions of years old on this world, the Third rock from the sun. Time is something that seriously injured workers have a lot of, because we are so limited in what we can and cannot do in a single day. Time marches on and cannot be stopped by anyone or anything, it is a basic principle of the Universe, and when your time runs out you are dead.
 There is no person on this Earth than can escape the reality that one day their time will be up on this beautiful floating oasis flying through space faster than a speeding bullet. We will all be dead one day, some of us much sooner than our neighbors or co-workers because we sustained a serious injury at work. Many seriously injured workers do not spend their days wiling away the hours worrying about time or how much of this precious resource we have left. Time is the one resource humans do NOT have an abundance of, it is not a mineral that some wealthy oligarch can simply go dig up and put in his pocket for the day when he will need it.

 There are no persons on this Earth that are more keenly aware of the relentless passing of time, than severely disabled persons. For us, time is precious and something that is not to be squandered or wasted.
 There are too many days in the last 10 years of my life that I have spent simply staring at the ceiling while crying, simply trying to pass from one second to the next with no access to relevant pain killers.
 There are too many days that I have spent simply to numbed by excessive quantities of pain killers, muscle relaxants, the ever increasing doses of antidepressants doled out by the Chronic Pain Clinic, that left me too exhausted to even get out of bed. The cumulative # of days that have been wiped out of my life forever is staggering. When I was going to the Chronic Pain Clinic and Dr. Yakunchikov was doping me up with antidepressants, he kept telling me "Take MORE, take MORE." I did, I believed him that this would help, I wanted so badly to believe him that it rendered me bedridden for months. That winter I lost at least 3 months of my life because I became a slobbering WCB ZOMBIE.

 You see, at the time I was NOT aware that the WCB had taken over paying for my treatment at the Chronic Pain Clinic, nobody ever told me. No paycheques arrived, just like today and the WCB plotted, conspired and ultimately got the pain doctor to convince to switch to the "HealthPointe Pain Clinic". That is where I first met Dr. Garvin Chueng, obviously a top performer for the WCB, possible their #1 Doctor at denying any kind of orthopaedic treatments to WCB Claimants.
 Healthpointe for the uninitiated is very closely associated with of a giant U.S. owned corporation. Their primary focus is on ambushing seriously injured workers with spinal deformaties as a result of workplace injuries, the secondary focus is on MONEY!
 Healthpointe and Dr. Chueng told me that I did not have ENOUGH insurance to be treated at their Hys Center facility. I responded the WCB has a billion dollar budget each year and that is not enough? Wow, these Healthpointe guys must really gouge the executives they spend most of their time chasing, these guys are worse than a bar full of amubulance chasers when it comes to money. Being constantly denied access to proper, timely and relevant medical care gives injured workers a great deal of time to reflect on what has happened, what is happening and what will most likely NEVER happen.
 Like being allowed access to my surgeon as per requested almost 9 months ago, just like my repeated requests for a high quality bed to sleep on, that request has been repeatedly denied by my current Claims Manager and her supervisor.
 For me this only highlights the insincerity of the people at the Millard Health and my current claims management team. Once again they are turning out to be TEAM NO! Well team NO, this may surprise you to know that the #1 thing I have requested for 11 years now is a decent quality bed. I have made a point of asking little children if they were in charge of helping a seriously injured man with a broken back, what would be the very FIRST thing you would buy for this man?
 There answer is always the same and has always been the same, "A bed.," is their response. Now if a little child can figure this out without any advanced education, then WHY is it that these people who CLAIM to have expertise in their field are not capable of pushing the enter button on their computer keyboard so that a man who is dying in pain every single hour of every single day can have a little bit of relief?
 Guy Kerr's insatiable GREED is the only resonable answer that I can conclude. You see in Guy Kerr's super plush playboy lifestyle cruising in his Porsche he is enjoying a pampered and enjoyable lifestyle, he is mobile he has complete use of all of his extremeties to go cycle, walk, run, play, drive his Porsche really fast on a curving road.  His grossly overpaid lifestyle is only possible via torturing, abusing and denying seriously injured workers access to proper, timely and relevant medications, treatments and surgeries and devices. But for us seriously injured workers, Guy Kerr simply can quietly smirk to himself knowing that as he drives by the Gimpies who are suffering not only from their broken backs, but from NOT having a good nights sleep, that he is profiteering from the massive suffering of others.
 We know for a fact that Guy Kerr sleeps on the highest thread count bedsheets ever made, it is how the very wealthy and elite rich people of Alberta pamper themselves as they see themselves as the deserving washed and annoited people of our society. To the rest of us, he is simply a pompous ass. He has made directives that FORBID claims managers from paying for a bed for me despite the fact that my own doctor has on 2 occasions PRESCRIBED an orthopaedic bed for me. But still, I am denied.
 These policy initiatives are truly a product of "The sick and emotionally deprived management team of the AB WCB". This is not a military secret, this is common knowledge backed up by years of stories exposed about the WCB of AB by the news media.

 I understand that it is not the physiotherapy teams fault, they are only towing the company line when it comes to promoting the ideology of the WCB. It is not their fault, they are in some cases the unwilling victims of ideological programming by the WCB organization. WCB has been doing this to claimants, and selling their own staff on their corporate ideology for many decades now. My father Dan McGillis was a flat roofer and fell off a roof back in the early sixties, that is how we (9 kids) became wards of the government when I was 2-1/2. This is why I always say that it is STILL 1959 in Alberta, somethings never change in this backwater bayou of The Great White North.

 I know what it is to be part of a corporate culture, in the end after 10 years of corporate programming the corporate employee will come to learn that the destiny of the Corporation is the only thing that matters to your Corporate masters. As a corporate prodigy you will come to discover one day that you are not the critical component of the company that you believed you were, and that you are just another replacement part for the overall organization that will one day become weary and mentally wear out. That is unless you are a natural born robot, and in that case you will easily mold yourself into "The Corporate Lifer lifestyle"; of blindly following the corporate mindset, no matter how gruesome the negative outcomes are on people's lives. To be a natural born robot, you are going to have to hone your suck-up skills with practice, and more scripted practice.
 Now repeat after me, "Yes sir!", "No sir!", "Can I lick your boots for you sir?"
Once you have perfected these skill sets then you are fully on your way to total Corporate Bliss and you can wow your friends and family with your corporate boot licking skills.

 What in the hell is going on at Millard? When you attend the Millard you will be unamused when you discover that EVERY single doorway that exits the Great Hall, proudly displays "Return to Work". Your recovery is never in doubt at Millard.(Sic)
Making reservations for their wonderful life in the tropics or playing in the mountain parks. The WCB are such a lucky bunch, we should admire and worship them and admire their dreamy lifestyles, and we should all strive to achieve the WCB management lifestyle as a glistening posh retirement home for old Conservative cronies of the PC Govt. Yes folks, the top heavy management of the WCB and Millard is glaringly obvious in their tired old facility because the building is MORE office than it is rehab facility.
 Where is the soft running track to ease seriously injured workers back into pain free walking? Like honestly, making old gimpies walk laps around a glorified office building on hard concrete is like torturing an old lame mare. You would not treat a horse in this manner, but it is totally acceptable to treat injured workers with this kind of Fred Flintstone bogus rehab. I believe it is the governments responsibility to bulldoze the Millard because of the horrors that this facility has unleashed on injured workers, and either build a REAL multidisciplinary rehab facility that is modern, utilizes modern day techniques and equipment or disperse their operations by meshing their duties into already existing clinics in the community.
 I have been to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester Minnesota and that is a real multidisciplinary medical facility that treats patients from across the globe. The Millard does not even come close to replicating the Mayo, for many different reasons but the #1 reason is they do not share any kind of similar Corporate Culture. The Mayo Clinics motto is: "Proper diagnosis is not only possible, it is probable." We know as injured workers that the WCB does not share these very same values, since their (WCB) entire culture rotates around the idea of Culpable Deniability or the idea that they are innocent because they claim that they were unaware that there were being crimes against humanity being committed by their co-workers on injured workers. These are my opinions and I stand by them.

Where is the pool complex for rehabilitative activities? Out of order? C'mon, how can this facility be considered to be leading edge? Alberta is bragged about in the news media as this place that is all flush with cash, yet there is no evidence of this overflowing wealth at this second rate rehab facility. We as Albertans are capable of so much more, and the Millard in its current form really does not measure up to it's own superlative hype because this is a facility that is built on the idea of denial. How can injured workers ever be best served by this facility if the primary directive of this organization is built on the idea of denial? When the primary directive supercedes the need to be properly rehabilitated, then this facility in it's current form can never survive because Corporate Greed supercedes - True rehabilitative NEEDs of the injured worker. IMHO
  But hey, at least the WCB staff all have awesome medical benefits that regular Joe can only dream about. This is why I have always said that the WCB takes every need of the seriously injured worker and turns it into Something about THEM.
 Like when the receptionist told me when I was late for the doctor, "The doctor's time is so precious." Like honestly? So by WCB ideology, this would indicate that MY Time is worthless. I find this proposition to be offensive and absurd. Like I told the receptionist, I stopped talking nice to doctors years ago, I have simply met too many of them now to be in any kind of awe.
 Time, to dream about the benefits of WCB that will NEVER be approved. And so it goes in the city of Deadmonton, in the province of Hellberta.
 And that folks is HOW this province got the moniker "HELLberta".
Peace out.

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