Movement to contact: finally

Scott and White have resurrected their bureaucratic corpse and, after the stately ritual of “waiting the required 12 business days to upload a request” — a timeframe that exists solely to remind you that patience is a form of punishment — they’ve decided to do the thing. Mind you, the Austin doc actually sent the PET scan order days ago; Scott and White treated it like an uninvited party guest: visible from the driveway but not allowed inside until they’d finished polishing the silverware.

I, being the helpful patient who refuses to accept being left to bureaucratic entropy, asked the referring doctor at Scott and White to formally refer me for the PET scan. He did — and they responded with the medical equivalent of “this ticket is defective.” He clarified the order later that same day. Poof. Suddenly I’m on the schedule.

Miracle cures do exist: they’re called paperwork corrections.

My PET scan is set for November 11 — appropriately, because nothing says “honor the veterans” like scheduling my medical indignities on Veterans Day. Which will probably find me slightly hungover, because Veterans Day is the hangover to the real holiday: the Marine Corps birthday. Two hundred and fifty years of leathernecks, foxholes, and stoic bad decisions — and yes, we’ll toast it. Historically, my participation in toasting has been… enthusiastic. Responsible drinking has been an aspirational concept for forty years, like utopia or a working vending machine in the barracks.

I’ve sworn to fight the rat bastard charlie with all the finesse of a Marine: take no prisoners, kill ’em all — in spirit, in metaphor, and maybe with some very pointed paperwork. (Let’s be clear: this is cinematic bravado, not a how-to. My preferred weapon is not red tape.)

On the home front, Amazon delivered my first set of eye patches yesterday. Bless their hearts. Surprisingly not as awkward as I feared. Depth perception, meanwhile, bowed out of the conversation without sending a forwarding address. Eye-hand coordination has gone from “competent” to “laughably speculative,” but I’ll adapt.

That’s the plan: prepare for the inevitable eviction of the rat bastard from his current tenancy. Not pleasant. Necessary. Like root canal anesthesia for the soul. And like the really bad punchline of a really bad joke, "I'll keep an eye for you".

As any Marine will tell you, no plan survives first contact. If everything starts looking rosy, toss a map because you’ve wandered into an ambush. So I’ll celebrate, stumble into a PET scan on a national holiday, and keep my hand on the paperwork — because in this theatre the only thing more lethal than a Marine is an irritated veteran filling out forms.

Laissez Les Bons Temps Rouler