Testing/ Monday Rant

I got up dark and early, shuffled kids along to bus stops and neighbors so that I can make sure the nine year old makes it to the bus stop okay. I get here (obviously still not at the hospital as I type this, but I wrote notes and had plenty of time to do so ) and I had to stand in line at Registration for twenty minutes. My appointment time has passed ten minutes ago. Finally get up to the window and the woman takes my insurance card, looks up my chart and says: “There’s no order, do you have it?”

I tell her no. Tell her I was preregistered last Wednesday. She tells me someone tried to call me on Friday. Told her no one left a message, that I had a sick child home from school. She says: “They told the lady who called for the orders on Friday that your doctor didn’t order these.”

I take a deep breath and tell her that I’m not the one who set up the appointment, his office did. They assured me they were sending the orders. So, she calls the office. They’re closed until 8:30 am. It is now 7:45 am. These are my choices:

• Go home and wait for them to reschedule, when it took me two weeks to even get this far or
• Sit here in the hospital til 8:30 when she can call them back. Ultrasound can ’squeeze me in between patients” but there’s ‘no guarantee’ how long I’ll have to sit there.

I’m fuming. Now, I’m not one to handle one emotion at a time. I never have been. When I’m that angry, the tears come. It’s like a pressure valve. This is week three of feeling miserable and hurting and nothing has been done. And what little bit has been done hasn’t worked. Something is wrong and I want to know what it is. So, I decide to wait. I go out to my car to try and calm down and I call Becky and every other word was a cuss word and I’m bawling. I go back into the hospital at 8:30 with red eyes a puffy face…I look wonderful. I sit there and I sit there and I sit there some more. At a quarter after nine, I’ve got orders. I’m moved to yet another waiting room where I sit and I sit and I sit. I’m thirsty and generally not a happy camper.

At 10:30, I go back to have this ultrasound. The tech doesn’t show me the screen or anything, not that I’d know what I was looking at anyhow. I asked her what she was looking at when she kept pushing in the same spot repeatedly. Asking me to take deep breaths, which was a task in itself as she was pushing.

I don’t know anything. She couldn’t tell me anything. I asked her when the results would be back because that is something else they’ve drug their feet on…she said probably tomorrow. So, I guess I get to be a squeeky wheel and call incessantly to find out what the ultrasounds showed and I’m really tempted to yell at whoever I talk too. Because it’s bad enough having to wait at a hospital when you are feeling well, but really bad when you’re hurting as it is and are stressed out because someone wasn’t incompetent, which seems to be happening quite a lot.

And yes, when this is all said and done or come March 3rd when I go see a real doctor, I am so finding another PCP. And they wonder why people don’t want to go to the doctor in the first place.