I had a conversation once with my Dr R about another doctor whose nurse wasn’t returning my phone calls over a worrisome subject outside Dr. R’s field. “He doesn’t understand,” I said, “I don’t complain. And if I *do* complain, LISTEN UP!”
Dr R agreed, “You don’t complain,” and I knew what he was thinking: about the time six years ago when I kept thinking I was surely getting better till the morning it all suddenly went south fast and my survival was no sure thing. He made me promise forevermore after that to tell him when I wasn’t doing well.
I’m not doing well. I know, I was, it was nice while it lasted.
He’s on sabbatical. The receptionist said his nurse would ask the other doctors’ nurses if one of them could fit me in today. Five hours later, no phone call–when I called again and said, here, let me add some context to that, I had a total colectomy four months ago, I got a receptionist in what-can-I-do mode telling me she’d told the nurse and the nurse would call me back.
Yeah, I’ve been here before. When that one doctor did not answer me for four days I finally parked myself in his waiting room before he arrived for work that morning and demanded to be seen. It worked.
Abdominal pain as a description may not be a big deal to a gastroenterologist who doesn’t know me, but I know me and random doubling over when I eat or walk is Not A Good Sign. See me. Now.
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Follow-up, 3:30: They blew me off. But at least I made them do so to my face rather than by their having me waiting by the phone for twelve hours. They told me to go to Urgent Care.
It’s a holiday weekend and clearly none of them wanted to put in any extra time.
You go to Urgent Care to get an IV. You do not go there to get a diagnosis. I got sent there once under similar circumstances and got a doctor who denied I had Crohn’s, denied the reality of the Asacol I’d been on for five years for Crohn’s, insisted I must have eaten raspberries with salmonella, insisted he saw that a lot lately (and on how many others of them were you wrong, too, sir?), tested me, and it came back negative as I knew it would. He insisted on re-testing me and culturing for ten days because by golly it was going to prove him right!
It stayed negative. Fancy that.
I figure today, well, if I’m healthy enough to manage driving myself there and back, then I guess I’ve validated their demand that I not get sick till Tuesday when the holiday weekend is over.