We walked away from that whole thing looking like the idiots… but I’m getting ahead of myself. Maybe this should be a “you suuuck” post.
I didn’t sleep at all last night. Thirty minutes, maybe. Bruce literally kept me up all night.
Bruce had a follow-up appointment scheduled today about his butt. You know, that whole thing at Levine? They made an appointment to make sure everything healed up alright. We didn’t schedule the appointment, they made it for us at the hospital. We just did what we were told. (And in hindsight, this whole Obamacare thing scares me even more.) We already had an appointment scheduled for his 2 month check-up, happens to be tomorrow, at Providence Pediatrics, Bruce’s regular doctors. They made this appointment in addition. Okay, we thought, the doctor wants to follow-up. Makes sense. Dr. Wolanski was the same way with my c-section. Bruce’s very first pediatrician in Virginia wanted to see him a couple of days after we left the hospital to check his weight and jaundice. ANYWAY… we did what we were told, and what we assumed was the right thing, the best thing, for Bruce.
So, we get there and parking is ri-goll-darned-diculous. There’s a garage, but not a lot of spaces and it’s just complicated. Our appointment note said to arrive 20 minutes early, but we got there right on time. As soon as we walked in I felt weird. Why do so many people in here speak spanish? ::Shrug:: Didn’t think much of it. Tom went to registration, I took Bruce in his car seat and sat down with my back to the majority of the huge waiting room. They asked for his parking pass and insurance card.
Tom came and sat down and the lady at the desk called him back after a minute or so. Tom came back and had me lean in so he could whisper. I forget his exact words, but he said that the lady said Bruce was kind of a special case, and most of the people there didn’t have healthcare.
GEE. YA’ DON’T SAY.
Tom was like, “how did you know?” I said, “well, look around.” I’m not saying anything about anybody – just that it was just a rough crowd. We sat in the waiting room for about an hour and a half, then in a patient room for another 30 minutes or so. They asked if we had a recent height and weight. Uh… you’re the nurse. Aren’t you supposed to get that?
We saw the doctors and they were asking lots of leading questions. Kind of coming at us with a, “so, what are you doing here?” attitude. To which we responded with a kind of, “you asked us to come,” attitude. It was kind of awkward. At some point Tom said that we were just following up after the surgery, and they said that everything looks great. Something like 10-30% of these things reoccur. It was 30 seconds, “Hi, how are you? Let’s get a look. Looks fine. Any questions? You’re free to go.” The doctor didn’t even shut the door behind him when he left. Typically they let us know when we should come back and tell us to take our time if we need to feed or change Bruce. There was none of that. Just, “we’re done. Get out.” Really awkward, really weird.
It’s stupid. We were already scheduled to see his regular doctor the next day. We thought we were seeing the surgeon, not just some random guy. Bruce’s regular M.D. could have looked at his butt crack and said, “Everything looks fine.” And we wouldn’t have had to wait 2 hours – on top of having to visit another doctor the very next day.
It’s all coming together. We had to twist some arms to get them to send a hospital billing rep to our room when we were trying to check out of the hospital. I guess they just assumed we had no insurance when they made the appointment because we hadn’t filed it yet.
We just looked so dumb. And it was dumb. We were taking valuable time away from poor people when we have a perfectly good doctor that we are scheduled to see in our fancy-schmancy Ballantyne area tomorrow anyway. We trekked all the way to Uptown, struggled with parking, waited 2 hours, and then got WTF looks from everyone JUST for a lesson on sociology and economics.
Stupid.
They called Tom this afternoon, reiterated that CSC was a clinic, and didn’t know how to process his insurance. LISTEN. YOU GUYS told US to come there. WORK IT OUT.
What was the point in asking us to get there early? We really should have gotten there at 7:15 for our 8:45 appointment. Who makes that big of a mistake? How do you book someone an appointment at a free clinic without even asking them? Why the heck wouldn’t we do a post-surgery follow-up with THE SURGEON? I guess that’s a tough question to ask. I guess they don’t want to call it the clinic because of the associated stigma. Guess what, we didn’t have time to spend TWO HOURS in a free-clinic waiting room because Tom’s insurance-paying-self had A JOB to get to! Got to get to work so he can pay those premiums, so we can sit in our South Charlotte waiting room for 15 minutes instead.
Ridiculous.
They had nothing to do with the surgery. It’s just a regular pediatrics office. What we did there we could have done anywhere! We could have done that TOMORROW at our nice, cushy, local, regular pediatric office! We are going there anyway!
http://www.snogglenews.com/shows/sunny/s01e02 Go to 05:10 and watch until about 06:30.
That La Kid 