My brother called, concerned that the sheriff would answer the phone. He didn’t say, but I assume he wasn’t too thrilled with the possibility I’d ask him to put up my bail money for going postal at the DMV.

I woke to the 5:00am alarm, gave Lew his meds and couldn’t get back to sleep. I wasn’t unhappy about it. I got up at 7:00. Fed Benny. Had breakfast.

After what seemed like seven years of listening to the recorded message telling me to stay on the line, a real person answered the phone in Raleigh. And I do mean, a REAL person. And, amazingly, she believed me when I told her that I hadn’t gotten their previous mail. She is sending the form again and she extended the deadline to July 1. AND, she said if I didn’t get the forms this time, they’d fax them directly to my doctor. I couldn’t believe it! That’s it. Here on out, its just a matter of forwarding the form to my neurologist. He’ll fill it out, basically the same way he did two years ago, and send it to Raleigh. Then I’ll get a letter from Raleigh saying I still have the “privilege” of driving for another two years.

For those of you who haven’t followed my previous adventures with the DMV . . . A while back, the state legislators decided that there needed to be a way to get the old codgers off the roads when they no longer should be driving. In an effort to make it fair, and not be accused of age discrimination, they wrote the law saying the DMV could require any individual to have their doctor say they are capable of driving in a safe manner. The form that was designed for the doctor to fill out ended up being seven pages! (Find a doctor who isn’t going to charge for filling that out!)

While the legislature was well intentioned, unfortunately, they left it up to the individual DMV examiners to decide who needed to fill out the forms. The reality of the situation, in my opinion, only people with obvious impairments are required to jump through the medical hoops. I really don’t think that its done anything to make our roads any safer. And yeah, maybe some day (when I’m feeling self-destructive), I’ll force the DMV’s hand and they’ll have to come up with some statistics proving that they require the average Joe to fill out the forms too.

In the meantime, I’m very thankful I’ve been seeing the same doctor for years and he doesn’t have a problem with filling out the form for me.