Sighting at the Doctor's Office (Long)

[Dips]

This happened the Friday before New Years. My daughter had been experiencing some symptoms and we decided to take her to her pediatrician's. Her doctor wasn't in on Fridays and everyone was booked for the day. They gave us an appointment with another doctor who would be there for the after-hours clinic. Our appointment time was 5:40 PM.

One thing to note was that we hadn't driven back to Boston since our son had died two weeks previously and this pediatrician's office was across the street from the hospital where he spent the last weeks of his life. Yes, Boston is a trek, but this practice is exceptional and we'd been going there since our daughter was born in 1990. We'd tried other practices in more convenient locations over the years and nobody else ever came close.

We knew it would be very painful, but our daughter's health comes first. So we made the journey, parked, tried not to look at the Christmas lights and the lit tree on the hospital building and trekked upstairs to the familiar waiting room that we knew would be full of the toys Kyle liked to play with while we waiting to see the doctor.

Our emotional state can best be described as shaky but controlled. We took the elevator up to the doctor's office, walked through the door and saw a waiting room more crowded than we'd ever seen it in the 17+ years we'd been going there. There wasn't even room to sit. We checked in settled down for what we knew was going to be a long wait. After some time one seat at the edge of the bench nearest reception opened up and my husband insisted I sit. I tried to give the seat to my daughter, but she wouldn't hear of it and sat on the floor next to me.

That's when the lady walked in. She brought a little girl in with her who looked to be about twelve, saw the crowd and and said "Oh, great!"

Of course, that's not sucky in itself. We'd had the same reaction when we'd seen the crowd, we just hadn't expressed it out loud. No, the suckiness started when she got up the receptionist. She told the receptionist that her daughter needed antibiotics and she needed them NOW.

The receptionist asked her what time her appointment was and the lady informed her she didn't have one. The receptionist informed her that her daughter could be seen that evening, but since she was a walk-in, she'd have to wait until everyone else had been seen first.

The lady turned and looked at the waiting room FULL of people and, upon finding that we hadn't in fact all disappeared in the two minutes since she first beheld us, gave us all her best cutbumface. Then, when she realized the room had no sympathy for her horrific plight, she glared at the room in anger.

Her next move was to tell the receptionist that the wait was too long, she needed the presciption in 20 minutes. The receptionist told her that wasn't going to happen and invited her to take a seat. Needless to say a line of people trying to check out was building behind her and the lady stated she wouldn't leave the window until she had her way.

At this point, the medical assistant who was in charge approached and somehow maneuvered the lady away from the window. There was a good, long argument. I didn't catch most of it but some of things that were discussed were:

1. No. We won't give you antibiotics until your daughter has been seen by a doctor.

2. The doctors are busy seeing patients who were there first and, no, slipping in for a quick consult won't happen.

3. No. You can't be seen by a nurse practioner to avoid waiting for a doctor. The NPs who are qualified to evaluate patients for antibiotics only work during the day and have gone home for the weekend.

4. If you feel that this is too much of an emergency to wait your turn, then there is a hospital right across the street. Shockingly enough, they have this thing called an EMERGENCY ROOM. And if walking all the way across the street is not possible due to the dire nature of the emergency, the staff here at this general care clinic will be more than happy to call an ambulance to take your daughter across the street. Needless to say the woman did not take that option. I got the feeling that she knew that triage in the ER would not work in her favor.

During all this, the poor girl was standing next to her mother looking like she'd love to disappear. She was completely mortified and embarassed, poor thing.

Eventually, the medical assistant very loudly declared the following, "See all those people? You're going to have to wait until after they've all been seen."

I loved her a little for that.

But the argument wore on below our hearing range until the medical assistant raised her voice again, "See all these charts (gesturing at the huge stack just inside the dutch door where the staff came to pick up each case)? All of these people were here first."

I loved her a little more.

The lady was finally rendered speechless, but she wasn't done. Nope. She decided to hover by the dutch door and watch as each chart was taken; I guess she wanted to be sure nobody "accidentally" got ahead of her after she had pissed of the staff so thoroughly.

Can we say privacy violation?

Yeah. That didn't go over well with the medical assistant at all. She asked the lady to move. The lady didn't want to move and demanded to talk to the doctor in charge. The assistant called someone and the lady finally left the waiting room and went to the back, presumably to see the doctor. The assistant shook her head and closed the door firmly. Next time Mr. Dips saw the assistant, he went up and told her she had handled the whole thing very calmly and professionally. She seemed to really appreciate the compliment.

We waited another hour and didn't see the awful lady again. We wondered if she had talked the doctor into giving her antibiotics after she complained about the front office staff, but assumed we'd never know. We knew the staff wouldn't disclose private medical information like that and wouldn't dream of asking.

But wouldn't you know? The lady came back. At this point the waiting room only had about six people left to be seen. The lady sat her daugther down and stated, "Turn and face me, dear. I don't want anyone making you sicker."

So this poor kid is sitting sideways at the end of a bench staring at her mother's belly with her back to the rest of us. As the other patients are called the mom is glaring at each of them as if they were personally responsible for her unacceptably long wait.

Soon it was down to them and us. They were waiting to see one doctor; we were waiting to see another.

Maybe I was imagining it, but the staff seemed to be really hoping that our doctor would be ready before theirs. The lady kept glancing at us as if this was race and we were her toughest competition. Or maybe she feared our germs would leap twenty feet?

As it turned out, they were called before we were. The lady gave us a triumphant look. I guess because she considered going second to last instead of last some sort of giant victory? We looked back at her like she was a weirdo.

The assistant who called them paused before taking them back to thank us for waiting so patiently and let us know we'd be seen soon.

We told them it was perfectly OK. That we understood it wasn't their fault they got busy didn't have a problem waiting our turn. We may have placed a little extra emphasis on the words "waiting our turn."

The lady certainly didn't appreciate the conversation. She glared at us. We smiled. She walked back to the exam room with her daughter and we never saw them again.

The good news is that our daughter is fine.

The bad news is that due to a snafu we had to go back the following Monday and use the lab in the hospital to find that out. We weren't ready to go back there and it was horrible.

But Jess is fine. That's much more important than anything. Thank God for that.

[BookstoreEscapee]

Glad to hear that Jess is OK and I hope she is feeling better.

I find myself hoping the girl just had a cold or other viral infection for which antibiotics would be useless, and that they got the kind of doctor who would tell them that instead of throwing antibiotics at them to make them go away. But then if that was the case I imagine you'd be able to hear it from the street

[Dips]

I find myself hoping the girl just had a cold or other viral infection for which antibiotics would be useless, and that they got the kind of doctor who would tell them that instead of throwing antibiotics at them to make them go away.

Heh. There's an evil part of me that was thinking that too.

I do know for a fact that all the doctors there are the type who won't prescribe antibiotics unless they are called for. That doesn't mean that they don't listen carefully to their patients and their parents and take what we say into account when they make a treatment decision. It's one of the reasons we continued using this practice even after we moved away from the city.

Another thing is that they won't let their feelings about the mother's behavior affect how they treat a patient. I don't know what happened in the exam room, but I know they gave that girl the same excellent care and appropriate treatment that everyone else receives at that practice.

This reminds me of another sighting from many years ago. My son was in the ICU at a hospital across town recovering from his first heart surgery when he was one month old. The father of one of the other patients became agitated and started yelling and threatening one of the staff members. Security was called and the man was dragged out of the unit.

A few hours later, I was waiting out in the hall to be let back in the unit and overheard the father crying and apologizing to the physician in charge [I only remember her as Bobbi, because she hated being called Dr. Lastname]. The father's main concern? That the fact that he'd been nasty to the staff would affect his son's care.

I'll never forget how gentle and reassuring she was with him. They obviously couldn't let him back in the unit for the sake of the other patients there, but her words were, "Sir, even if you had punched me in the nose and called me any name you could think of, I'd still give your son the best care I could. We're all going to care for him the best we can. There's nothing you could do that would cause us to give him less than our best." I got rung into the unit at the point and walking past them saw her give the poor guy a hug. Needless to say, I was crying when I got inside. The doc came in a few minutes later and she was a little misty-eyed.

To lighten things up a bit, I also overheard Bobbi once on rounds telling the residents that mothers of infant patients should be encouraged to nurse and/or pump breastmilk because there's nothing better for them than "high-octane boob juice."