Is there a doctor in the house?

For a week now I’ve been sick. Ever since I took a day off, almost like Nostrodamus in my ability to predict the future and know when I’d be sick for real, I’ve been really ill. Less so the past couple of days. The love of my life has been increasingly ill since Sunday, in fact yesterday morning she was bad enough I decided to stay home from work in the morning long enough to get her to a doctor. Following is the story of our adventure in trying to get her “foreign arse” seen by a doctor here.

The first place we went was not an office that took walk up patients. They directed us to an Immediate Care center a couple of miles away, who with their snotty faced, goofy minded receptionist, charged as much as $219 for an office visit for my girl who has no American insurance on her visit from the UK. Our last shot at a doctor this day (actually was yesterday – Wednesday) was a good ways out of town, though we got there by bus just fine. I had been there some two years earlier, a doctor that had gotten tired of the insurance industry BS and decided a few years ago to only take payment at time of service from the patient, and not deal with insurance companies.

The old lady that runs the front desk looked over her glasses at us both, bundled tightly, sniffling and coughing a bit as we had just come in from the intense cold. I asked her nicely if there was any chance of being seen “today” given the obvious backlog they had in the waiting room. My previous experience there had been very good but it was clear to me from the moment I opened the door this day that it would be another story this time.

“Are you a current patient?” she asked.

“Yes”, I replied. “Any chance you can work us in today at all?”

“Well it ain’t gonna be this morning I can tell you that much!” she responded.

I went on to tell her that my fiance was not a current patient and she responded shaking her head strongly side to side, “No way on God’s green earth,” can my girl who is here from Scotland be seen. They’re not taking new patients for crying out loud! My girl has no known doctor, is sick as hell and truly needs a prescription or two to get well, just rode for an hour on a bus to get here yet is just to be turned away without regard for circumstance – and will be forced to stand in the 20 degree cold (colder with the windchill), to wait for another bus to take her home where she started this morning with nothing more than she left with, aside from a freakin story to tell.

All I wanted was to have her seen by a physician that could write her a prescription for the antibiotics she so clearly needs if she is to get well any time soon. That’s it, just to be seen, at a reasonable price to be paid out of pocket. Just ask yourself, if you were paying for such an office visit, what dollar amount would be reasonable to you? ($50, $75, $100, more or less?) How about a little rational behavior here folks? Just a bit please? Anyhoo…

Well, thankfully I got her an appointment on the southside of town for this morning (Thursday a.m.) and all went great. She’s taking meds and antibiotics for her infection and will surely be well in a matter of days. Still, it was disturbing that some people truly do not listen to situations, to people. They only hear excuses and BS from the past and refuse to consider that real people may have real issues that present extraordinary circumstances worthy of making exceptions to rules. Fortunately, it only cost us four hours of rest for her and four hours of pay for me. Thanks for that :p .

~ by casualnonsense on February 28, 2008.