Give Up Your Guns And We Might As Well Be Canada

What in the blue blazes of hell is happening to our medical system? Are doctors so greedy for HMO dollars that they keep accepting patients until they are too busy to pay attention to the ones they already have? Or is it the rising malpractice insurance and other overhead that forces them to overbook?

I hope this is somewhat coherent, because right now I’m so mad I could shoot fire out of my eyes.

I’d already made the decision to change my primary care physician. I just wrote the kiss-off letter; it’s going in the mail today. I’ve only been going to him for two years, and in the beginning it was fine. If I had a serious problem and needed to be seen right away, I could get an appointment. If the doctor was too busy, I’d get to see one of his associates. No problem there. Now when I call (and this has been going on for the last few months), I can’t get an appointment on short notice with anyone save for a nurse or my doctor’s assistant, who used to be more thorough but now, because they continue to book more and more patients, she is missing things that I even know should be checked.

I’d put up with this from specialists. Everyone says it takes a long time to get in, and I’ve made my peace with that. But at least I know that I have an appointment. After waiting the two or three months it might take to get in, at least I know that (if I come prepared with questions) that I’m going to get that specialist’s full attention.

Now I’m starting to feel like I’m on an assembly line. Just one more chart, just one more spine, just one more minute you’ll have to wait and I’m sure the doctor will see you sometime before spiders start spinning webs between you and your chair.

Meanwhile, I wait. I wait with ice packs and pain relievers that make me sick, I wait with exercises I can’t do, I wait with sighs from receptionists who can’t do anything about it other than put me on a cancellation list.

The last straw is that now this is happening with my physical therapist. Other doctors put me off, but I know that he can (usually) squeeze me in. Now he can’t even do that. He’s so overbooked that if he sees me at all, it’s only for a quick question or something that requires a quick solution, like a vertebrae out of alignment that he can instantly snap back in.

But I’m not a quick solution. I’m still having back pain from the fall I had last Monday. When I managed to be shoehorned into his day on Thursday, it was only to snap a couple of things back in place. I told him other things weren’t feeling right, but he took off, pulled someplace else, gone to ping-pong around his four other patients that he was seeing at the same time.

And I still had pain.

And I still have pain.

And I’m having another steroid injection on Wednesday, a little lower this time, because when I had my post-shot consultation with the pain guy, that is what he determined was hurting me. So after I have the shot, I can’t go anywhere near my physical therapist for ten days.

And I called this morning to see if he could get in – somewhere – before Wednesday and there was nothing the trusty receptionist could do.

And I think it might be time to tell him we’re through. It would break my heart, but I have to take care of myself and I have to find a medical team that is responsive, that treats me like a person.

My PT once told me, when I claimed that he wasn’t listening to one of my concerns, “The day I stop listening to my patients is the day I hang it up.”

Well, he’s stopped listening. At least to me.

I still have Word open, I still have my stamps and envelopes out, I could still write one more letter.

Damn, I don’t want to have to do that. But if I have to, I will.