I do so hope that you find yourself facing some kind of urgent need from a bureaucracy, and some paper-rattling, “I-don’t-have-to-exert-myself-to-help-you” twit declines your request with the same smug, “you’re not being reasonable,” that you just gave me.
Last Thursday night/Friday morning, I sent an email to my parents’ PCP. I informed him of the general condition of both my parents, and that my Mother was having a discharge meeting scheduled for Monday of this week. I outlined my belief that because my mother’s heart incident was stress-related it is imperative that we get my father out of the house before, or as, my mother comes home.
I then added a paragraph about the possibility that we’d need scripts, or authorizations from the doctor, and a (demonstrably vain) hope that he would be ready to provide such as it was determined that they’d be necessary.
Well, yesterday we got into finalizing the plans for my father. We’ve found a respite care room that he seems qualified for, in an excellent facility, with wonderful people. And we’re all set to have Dad move in for a month, while we set up a more permanent solution.
We just need a doctor to sign off on Dad’s medical history, and clear him for assisted living.
And Dad’s doctor is out of town this week. And none of the other doctors in the practice are willing to consider doing a damned thing about this. If we had been told Friday that getting permissions this week would be difficult we could have sped any of the paperwork requirements through last week. But no one ever got back to us about this.
So, now you’re sitting there, smugly telling me that it’s not reasonable to expect a doctor’s office to be able to fill out a form quickly to reduced stress on a woman who just had the next-best thing to a heart attack. A condition that was definitely stress-induced, and whose single greatest source of stress is caring for, and living with, my father.
And you want me to have them living together for the coming weekend. When they can barely keep from sniping at each other with hourly visits these days?
You have the gall to tell me that I’m being unreasonable?
You, when the office of my father’s PCP has never spoken directly with me about my father or my mother’s care and treatment since the day you were informed by me about my mother’s cardio-myopathy? Who has on record that you are not supposed to talk to my father about any medical information - because he’s terrible about passing on messages, or giving out clear details.
When you have had a record this summer of forgetting to pass on test results to other doctors; When your office did cost my father one surgery date by failing to provide the neurosurgeon with timely information; When you’ve lost records, and only gotten primly compliant with strict HIPPA rules after you were called on not following the communications protocols we’d requested several times; When you can’t follow those fucking communications protocols, even now.
And you’re telling me I’m being unreasonable?
You’re damned tooting right I’m being unreasonable. This is the straw that broke the camel’s back. You just lost two patients. I will see to it my parents find a new PCP. Both of them. And take their pharmacy business elsewhere as well. I will blacken your name any time people bring up medical care. I will do everything in my power to see that your facility is metaphorically burned down, and the lot it stands upon sown with salt and made to be a blight upon the memory of those unfortunates who recognize what the sterile, stunted field used to be.
If you could fucking communicate in a timely manner, I would have been glad to do what needed to be done to get the paperwork to you last week. But you frigging arrogant tin-plated dieties see no need to accommodate any one else’s imperatives. Just your own.
Fortunately, I do have at least one idea that I think might work: My father is being co-managed in his treatment with a GP working out of the local VA clinic.
Yes. You filthy worthless wastes of oxygen - you’re proving yourselves to be less useful and responsive than the VA. My father is of the generation that used to use the expression: “Why pay for lab rats when veterans are free.” And we both believe that the VA will be more helpful, and more responsive than you are.
Just be glad I don’t have the franchise for oxygen permits. You wouldn’t be able to pay enough for more than about 200 liters a day.
