Prove Yourself Brave, Truthful and Unselfish, and Someday...

After twelve years of concerted effort, slave labor, seemingly endless waiting and more money than I want to think about, my license for the independent practice of psychology, issued by The Great State of Texas arrived in the mail today. So the training wheels are off and now I'm finally a real boy.

More to come.

I Heard the News Today, Oh Boy...

Well, I heard last week anyway. The letter read something like, "Dear APPLICANT, The Great State of Texas is pleased to inform you that you have received a passing score on the oral examination for independent practice in psychology." After the ordeal I've been through, I made quite the ruckus screaming and crying and swearing and dancing and swearing down the driveway from the mailbox toward the house - until I read further:

"Now, if you will kindly fill out another 36-page pile of paperwork and send us yet another ridiculous pile of money we'll be happy to get that final piece of paper you need to work independently to you in - oh, say another six weeks or so."

*sigh* Talk about bittersweet. It's a neverending fuck-with situation, isn't it? Seriously the story of my life since 1997 has been "Hurry up and wait." Fuckers.

So that's what I've been doing - tracking down signatures and getting all my proverbial shit in one sock so I can send said piles to Austin - so I can wait some more.

oh joy.

4 Months From Now

Sigh. Here I sit trying to cobble together enough business every month to pay my bills. Altogether they aren't much really, but I thought seriously that I'd at least be making a living wage by this point and could contribute more to our family expenses. As it stands, I have what amounts to a handful of part time jobs, none of which pay worth a crap because they're kind of on an on-call basis, and the people I work for have pretty crappy reputations, so the referrals aren't coming in like they used to, so I'm not getting called as often. Granted part of the problem is that some of the referring agencies are at the end of their budget year, so they should pick up a little after September 1.

The good news though is that four months from today, my postdoc year (read: indentured servitude) will be over and I can start my independent professional life on my own terms. Sure I'll be slogging through the Medicare and insurance provider paperwork and trying to get established in my own practice with all the headaches and bills that entails, but at least I will be working under my own reputation and license, not someone else's. The better news is that I am already beginning to establish my own reputation and relationships with the major referrers in the region. They like my work, they like me personally and they have made it very clear that they want to know when and where I hang my shingle. It just can't be done until after the licensing paperwork is completed. I'll mail it December 4. Last year when I filed my provisional paperwork on the same date, it was approved December 31. Of course I didn't get the confirmation for a couple more weeks, but at least I got it.

The training for the giant corporate online university feels oddly like American Idol. There ended up being 378 trainees in my entry level class, then I was assigned to a group of 1o. Within the first week 4 of them dropped. Of the remaining 6 only 3 of us were in the same entry class so there was at least one other huge ass entry class somewhere. The training itself seems like a lot of busy work, but they have selected me to continue on to the next stage so that's good, I guess, except so far I'm not seeing a lot of attention being paid to academic rigor. After the next 2 weeks in developing syllabi et cetera (mind you I've already been through the first 2 weeks so in total this will be a full month of "training" i.e. working for free), the next stage will see me actually teaching a class with an instructor's instructor who can give me feedback on how I'm doing. I appreciate that. I will get paid the full rate for a doctoral level instructor for teaching that class, but that won't happen until the end of September. At least it's something to look forward to, but there's no guarantee that I'll even be offered a position until after the class wraps up in mid-to-late October.

Still no word on whether or not I'll be teaching at the community college again, and class starts in 3 weeks. The Psyc/Soci instructor/coordinator guy left in May, which is why the division chair asked me to apply for that job, which I did immediately - in May. Now the division chair is leaving so the two top leadership positions in that area are vacant, and nobody's saying a word. I'm debating whether to shoot a friendly email to the human resources coordinator to check on the status of my application.

The good news of the whole thing is that at least I'm 2/3 of the way through the postdoctoral purgatory year and that I can see the light at the end of the tunnel. Take one look around and you can see that nobody's starving around here. We still have a roof over our heads, the lights are still on, and I still have stuff I can sell on eBay. I can do anything for 4 months. However, if you know the money fairy, could you send it my way? Kthxbai.

Hobbled

I apologize for not posting much of late. A lot's been going on. I've been waiting patiently for my provisional license paperwork to go through since early December. It finally came in last week. The state board will even allow me to sit for my final oral examination for full licensure while I'm finishing my postdoc year. Since they're only conducted in January and July, I've sent in the money (while I still have some) to sit in July . That way come December 4, I'm ready to practice on my own. I even got to pick my specialty area - neuropsychology. That's the good part.

The bad part is that I can't do a damn thing with a provisional psychology license, even though it's supposed to be a step up from the Associate's license I've held since 2004. Despite the fact that I've been doing neuropsychological and psychological assessment for the last six years and have somewhere in the area of six thousand hours in practicum, specialized clinical training, research practicum, internship and doctoral research, without that last piece of paper apparently I still don't have enough experience to do anything without having my hand held. Part of what my postdoc is supposed to entail is testing geriatric patients (my area of expertise, by the way). These people inevitably have Medicare. After wading through the national Medicare website and the state Medicare website for what feels like months and not finding information relevant to the questions I had, I was randomly picked to participate in a survey. Several of the survey questions dealt with the type and relevance of information that came up in the search results (1 search term = 10,000 irrelevant hits, 2 search terms = 20,000 irrelevant hits), the availability of customer support (nonexistent) and how satisfied I was with the service overall (yeah right). I posted my unvarnished opinions - in polite language, no less, gave them my contact information, and hit "submit."

The next morning a customer care representative named Jennifer called me from the state Medicare servicer. She was very sweet and polite and not at all the typical government drone. She actually wanted to help. I explained to her that the information I was finding was inconsistent and confusing and that I was frustrated with the process. She apologized and said that unfortunately, my complaints were not at all uncommon, in fact they were the norm and she knew what a joke it all is. She didn't know the answers to my questions, and didn't know where to find them, but wrote them down to go ask her supervisor and called me back within ten minutes.

Turns out that of the 3 separate sets of Medicare Part B paperwork, that I have to fill out all 3 and my boss/business partners also have to fill out all 3. That's 9 iterations of the same information. Yes, they'll be submitted in triplicate to the Department of the Office of the Division of Redundancy Department. That's irrelevant right now anyway, because with my license I can't bill Medicare. I have to be fully licensed to bill Medicare, or anyone else, despite the fact that had I pursued an MD which is a lower degree, and easier and faster to obtain, I would be able to bill Medicare with my provisional license. Stupidheads.

Why did the great bloated and lumbering government bureaucracy cross the road? Who knows? Why the hell do they do anything?

Now I can still do the testing, as long as my boss is actually in the next room (nevermind that I've done it for six years already - mostly in a public hospital, so I've Seen. It. All.), but I can't bill for my time. He can bill for me at half the rate, noting that the testing was done by a "technician," then turn around and pay me an as yet to be determined flat hourly rate as an employee. Granted, this frees up some of his time to test other patients, but we were planning for me to go out and do rural geriatric outreach. He can't be two places at once so that's out and now I have to come up with a Plan B so that I can get some money coming in. I can't wait until December to start getting paid. I like my car and want to keep it. That old Merle Haggard song, "If We Make It Through December," keeps running through my head. Most of the work I've done in the last six years has been unpaid but now that I've gotten the PhD, the student loan fairy doesn't come here anymore.

The Man, who is officially retired now and also has no foreseeable income, was great about it though. When I told him, I was really expecting much grumbling, bitching and blaming along the lines of, "Spent all that money and worked your ass off for ten years working for free and now you have the doctorate and you can't get paid? Why couldn't you just stop with a bachelor's degree like normal people?" et cetera. Instead, he shocked the hell out of me by putting his arms around me and saying, "Sorry about that, Babe. We'll make it. We always do." This is true. I've soldiered on through far worse than this - and for longer than 10 months. I'm trying to be pissed off about not this latest wave of bullshit to slog through, but after blasting through four degrees and nearly a quarter million dollars in ten years, more than anything I just feel empty and frustrated and hobbled. I've already let the student loan companies know that when my payments start coming due in late May, that I'll be needing those deferment papers immediately because I can't pay what I don't have. Sigh.

So this is where I explain my blogging silence of late, dear readers. I've been busy looking for a job that I can get paid for doing. I've put in applications to teach psychology at every possible online university I can think of, and some more that I'd never heard of. I even put in an application at the university where I earned my BS degree to teach there, which I wasn't planning to do for several more years - like after I'd gotten my student loans paid off and was getting ready to retire from clinical work. It was the only one that really looked promising. University policy is to throw away incomplete applications. There were 17 applicants and of the 17, only one other person besides me submitted all of the requisite application materials. The other person only has a Master's and is ABD in a PsyD program. That position doesn't begin until August. I've also called one of the docs I worked under during my internship. My friends who still work for her say she's begging for people to do testing for the neverending parade of people applying for social security disability and Texas Rehabilitation Commission benefits. She has 14 therapists sharing 4 offices Monday through Thursday, but I'm going to see about going in on Fridays and Saturdays when the office is officially closed to do the evals. We'll see. Cross your fingers that the "get paid for working" fairy pays me a visit.