Hey, lady at the doctor’s office – yes you! I’m trying very hard to get into your head and see things from your point of view. I do try my utmost to understand things from the other side, but I’m having a difficult time accepting your behavior.
I suppose you get a constant stream of patients who tell you how to do your job. Likewise, you probably get plenty who do stupid things.
I wouldn’t really be surprised if you get several who are trying to pull a fast one on you.
Let’s get one thing straight:
I am not trying to con the doctor into prescribing me hard core narcotics!
Please don’t treat me as if I were.
I did my very best to explain the situation. Actually, I am usually a very calm individual. In fact, I can’t rant very well and this whole post will suffer because of it. Nevertheless, you may have noticed that I was speaking sharply to you this afternoon. Respectfully, but sharply.
Since you weren’t listening very carefully, I’ll lay it out here.
Many months ago, I managed to mess up my knees fairly well while running. After weeks of annoying pain and two women in my house nagging me to go to the doctor, I finally called your facility and was given an appointment with “Dr. Smith”
The good doctor yanked and twisted my legs this way and that, decided that nothing serious was wrong, and gave me a prescription for Celebrex, for the inflammation. That stuff was incredible! After having suffered weeks of dull pain, quick tiring knee joints, and so forth, the medicine had a profound effect overnight. I was back at the gym in a few days, and that should have been that.
Well, stupid me. It’s eight months later and I did it again. I could feel the exact same symptoms, caused by the exact same activity, and this morning, my right knee was in agony by the time I made it to my office (a few hundred yards from the parking lot). My thought: “Dr. Smith” and his bitchin’ pills!
I called up your fine place of business as soon as you opened and was immediately rewarded with the voice of a pleasant girl.
She listened attentively to my distress and gave me an appointment for next Wednesday – this is good, since I want to take care of this leg issue once and for all, but it’s a bit of a wait for the relief I wanted.
Pay attention now…
I kindly asked your morning receptionist if she might implore of the good doctor that he write me a prescription for Celebrex to get me going until I could see him on Wednesday. You see, I figured it thusly: It’s probably the same damned thing, those pills worked well, and if the doctor disagrees, he will simply say so and that will be that.
The nice girl said “Oh, what was that? Celebrex? We can give you some free samples we have in the office. Can you stop by some time this afternoon?”
I said “Great! I’ll be by right after work. I forgot the dosage I took, so could you please find out from the doctor?”
She said “Ok, they will be waiting at the front desk for you.”
I placed the phone in its cradle and smiled as I went onto my next task, calling my mechanic about the clutch master and slave cylinders he is replacing in my vehicle. To be honest, the girl was so nice and the thought of the freebie samples was so pleasant that I didn’t mind when the mechanic told me he had to use an OEM part that would be a hundred dollars more than the after market part he had been hoping to use.
In fact, I was tickled pink that I would stop by your place of business, say “Hello, I’m minor7flat5,” and one of you would hand me a little doggy bag and bid me good day.
I should have trusted my instincts. I always place follow up calls with any service provider who has promised me something since half of them do not fulfill, in general. Why didn’t I do this today? Because the girl was so darned perky and convincing.
You changed that.
I slipped out of work a half hour early so as to make the little side trip to your office. I strode up to your counter with a confident smile and stated my name, “My Celebrex should be here.”
There was a delay.
Something was wrong.
One woman asked me “Who did you speak to this morning?”
“I don’t know. I made an appointment, though. Check that.”
More delay.
People walking about the records shelves in deep thought.
Finally, a different girl appeared, telling me that there was no such mention in my record of this and that it could never happen since I haven’t seen the doctor in almost a year. “We don’t do that. Who said you could have samples?”
I could see the sneer forming on the faces of all four people clustered in the general area near me. As soon as I mentioned those free samples, everything else I said was ignored. You see, I was obviously trying to do something illicit.
After I expressed my disbelief a third time, I was asked again “Who did you talk to?”,
I said, somewhat sharply, “Doesn’t your scheduling software record the name of the person who enters an appointment?”
I saw an “Oh yes!” glint in her eyes. She then typed a few characters and looked at the initials next to my appointment.
She then mumbled these words: “She should know better…”
Yes.
One of your employees mumbled, under her breath, that the perky girl from the morning “should know better”
You were WRONG. Someone in your office made a MISTAKE.
Well, then. The present girl went in to the depths of the office and found YOU. Yes YOU. I don’t know who you are. You might be a doctor, a nurse, the office manager, or even another one of the receptionists. I got the feeling that you were in charge of the receptionists.
No, you did not apologize. Rather, when I told you my brief tale, you simply told me how “We don’t do that”. As soon as your ears heard some key word, you were deaf to everything else.
You told me “We can’t do that unless the doctor prescribes it since you haven’t been here in over three months.”
No shit!
If your staff hadn’t screwed up this morning, they would have spoken with “Dr. Smith”, like I asked them to in the first place.
Get this clear in your mind:
I did not ask for free frigging samples of Celebrex. Your worker kindly offered them to me. I asked to have the doctor give me a prescription, and then only if it were appropriate.
I do thank you because you offered to have the evening shift on-call physician consider the case, and he did, in fact, call it in to my pharmacy. Clearly, you do have your priorities straight: the medication is in my hands now, so all that is left is the lingering memory of the utterly disrespectful way in which I was treated by you and your staff:
You see, I still feel as if you think that I did something wrong. Shady, perhaps. Four different people told me how wrong I was this afternoon, as if speaking to a child. When in the end your own worker effectively confirmed that this was your office’s mistake, you didn’t do the kind thing and simply apologize while fixing the problem. No. You lectured me, like the others. I cringed as I received a glare reserved for someone who is trying to connive the doctor into prescribing a month’s supply of serious painkillers.
Well, now that that’s out of my system, I hope this stuff works on my joints now like it did the last time!