Wednesday, October 27, 2010

The doctor...

So I'm going to vent and whine about our ridiculous health insurance/medical care stuff. So if you're tired of this just feel free to move on. As I mentioned a few posts ago we could not find a pediatrician who would accept medicad. We called 20 different doctors/practices and we found one who would see us. So due to the lack of options we booked an appointment with the doctor.

The whole experience was just kind of odd.  The office was nice and brand new and they had only been seeing patients since May. We were the only patients scheduled for that entire morning and I got the sense that the doctor was incredibly bored. First he helped his nurse input the babies vaccination records (I've never seen a doctor actually do this). Then when he was doing the exams on the babies it took forever. Over an hour for each one. Plus he was really adamant that he needed to look at Emerson's throat. She panicked having the stick in her mouth, was gagging and then threw up. She was hysterical for the entire visit. Checking her throat was really not necessary.

Then we were doing the medical history for Emerson and mentioned her heart murmur. We saw a cardiologist for it last year and at that time it was determined to be just a small benign murmur that should close on its own. He checked and he could still hear it so he decided that an EKG was in order (I'm telling you this doctor was bored).

So off we went to attempt an EKG on a still hysterical Emerson. At this point Eli was worried about his sister and kept pointing for Marcus to take him to her so he could make sure she was okay (He also started crying when the doctor was looking at Emerson's throat).

I don't know much about medicine but according to Marcus (who is in the know about cardiac stuff) there wasn't really much that a doctor could tell about a murmur on the EKG especially since she was screaming hysterically).

So that was fun. Then it was Eli's turn. We mentioned that Eli had a fever the night before but he was fine today and that he tends to get fevers a lot. This crazy doctor decided that maybe this is a result of a neurological temperature instability.... huh?

I once heard on Scrubs and Grey's Anatomy the line, "When doctors hear hooves they should think horses not zebras." (You can see where my medical info. comes from). Implying that doctors should start with common causes you know like viruses before jumping to neurological issues.

So the doctor left the room to do some "research" and came back with a bunch of questions related to this neurological issue. Bottom line, turns out Eli probably doesn't have this neurological issue, Shocking, but if we wanted we could do an MRI... um for what?

Then we moved on to the Synagis shot for RSV. He saw the babies had it last year so he wanted to get it for them again. Which I actually appreciate but I'm 99.9% positive that they will not be approved this year (which I told him). That didn't stop him though, with us still waiting he proceeds to call somebody for approval and subsequently gets put on hold forever. (Again why didn't he do this on his own time and give us a call with what he found out).

The whole thing was just odd and if we had any choice at all in the we would not go back to him. We were there for over 3 hours and we just didn't feel overly confident in his care.

It just makes me so mad that because we don't have $20,000 to spend on the babies health coverage that we are expected to get subpar care. How is this even legal? The whole health care situation in this country is just infuriating and I feel guilty that they are getting less than the best because of our inability to financially provide the ridiculous cost for health coverage.

Some stats they were 17.5 months old and Eli weighed 21 lbs even and Emerson weighed 21 lbs 2 oz.

1 comment:

Carlita said...

It sounds suspiciously like all those tests are a way to bring in some federal $$$$. Very disturbing indeed. I'm so sorry that healthcare is such a damn mess in this country and the political climate is so deranged that it is impossible to actually do anything about it. You're absolutely right to rant - and, I believe, you also have every right to refuse testing. Now that you know how this doc operates, I would just politely decline the next time he suspects some neuro-cardio-blahblahblah condition.