Last night I got a call asking me to participate in a survey having to do with healthcare in Washington. My usual policy is to refuse to talk to anyone I don’t know when they call me on the phone during the evening while I’m trying to eat and watch my shows. But in this case, I’d already eaten and I did have a vague recollection of some flier sent to the house about a problem with Washington healthcare so I went along with it.
He said it was 15-20 minutes and he wasn’t kidding. Geez, there are few things we didn’t talk about. Both actual questions about my health, habits, recent illnesses mental and physicial and questions about my healthcare coverage and random situations in my household. Like: did we have a carbon monoxide detector? (no) did we read the little flier we get about our drinking water quality? (yes) do we have a gas powered generator in our home? (no) in the past year have we gone without phone service for more than two weeks not related to weather outages? (no) have I ever heard of radon? (no).
It went on and on. A lot of the questions were about my general health and as we were going through it was like, “I am kicking ass on this survey!” have you been so depressed you couldn’t get out of bed? (no!) have you ever been diagnosed with heart disease? (no!) used drugs with needles even just one time or had sex w/ someone who has? (no!) something about chicken pox in the past 2 years (no!)
Then we got to the alcoholic beverage intake question: in the last 30 days, how many days have you consumed at least 1 alcoholic beverage? (um, 30) how many days have you consumed at least 2 alcoholic beverages? (um, 30) how many days have you consumed 4 or more alcoholic beverages (zero, yes!)