Today I met with the infectious disease doctor, an outstanding doctor. My bio markers reflecting the inflammation causing me pain are headed down. Based on this progress, the doctor said I am close to be able to stop the antibiotics and return the IV pump I have been lugging around 24/7 for more than 40 days. The long skinny tubing has caused a lot of frustration as I wrote last week. Getting rid of it will be a great day, on December 29.
Today was not so great as I spent a few hours seeking to buy some ostomy supplies. An ostomy is a surgical procedure which creates a stoma. A stoma is the surgically created opening on the abdomen which connects the urinary system to the outside of the body so waste can travel into a pouch attached to the abdomen instead of the usual route. (more about ostomy in another post).
The pouch needs to be replaced every four or five days. There are some other supplies involved. Medicare pays for everything. The ostomy industry is not very big. A number of small companies dominate collectively. I picked an ostomy distributor at random from a Medicare approved list, and visited their website. I entered all my insurance and personal information and clicked to open the web account.
They sent me an email to verify my email address. This is a standard procedure. I opened the link in the email and then clicked on the “verify” button on the webpage. Nothing happened. I called the support line and told them of the problem. They asked what browser I was using. I said Firefox. I normally use Safari on my Mac but occasionally I use Firefox. It is known for working with most any website. The support person said, “We don’t support Boxfire”. I said it was Firefox. The person said Boxfire has an encryption feature which doesn’t work with our web server. The feature they were talking about is used to authenticate the sending email address. They don’t have authentication setup on their server, so rather than fix that, they removed “Boxfire” from their list of supported browsers. Duh.
I tried another site. After entering all my information, I verified my email address, and they sent me a link. The link took me to their homepage. It said, “If you are already a registered user, then click to register”. Duh. I tried another website and it was equally lame. I tried calling and they said they are open from 9am to 4pm West coast time. It was 3:30 my time, 12:30 their time. Duh #3.
Companies like this sometimes say we are not Amazon. I say you never will be. I remember in 1995 when Amazon only sold books, about 5,000 of them. I wrote about this in Net Attitude: What It Is, How to Get It, and Why Your Company Can’t Survive Without It which was published in 2001. I urged CEOs of companies to use their website at least once a week to see how easy or difficult it was to use. I wrote an updated version in 2016. Things had not changed for many websites including those of some huge companies. Almost ten years later, for many companies, they have still not figured out the website is for their customers not for the company.
If you want to browse through other posts about the journey to recovery, I have created a separate page for an index of them. See link below.
Epilogue – The images of the road to recovery were generated by Perplexity Pro AI for use in my blog. All articles were written by me.
