Medical Ladies
A brief dramatic/comic interlude from the “What Not to do in Marriage and Divorce” manual you are wasting your time reading in this blog. What you might call a change of pace which still covers a phenomenon which is critical in our lives.
Who do you believe delivers the medical care you get when you visit the doctor or even end up in the hospital? You know out of the whole amount of time you are scheduling or at an office visit you actually see the doctor or nurse practitioner for what……..10 minutes, five minutes three minutes, less? You make the appointment, wait in the office waiting room and wait in the examining room usually ½ clothed for 1 hour, 2 hours 3 hours or more.
In the hospital you lie in bed and see the doctor if at all once every two days and even someone on the level of a nurse practitioner or RN once an hour.
Since you are reading this blog you are probably smart enough to know this is okay because if you get more attention from the higher ups something is wrong, the higher the rank you see in a medical situation the sicker you are so you rarely ask for El Capitan except to get out.
But you must have thought about whom the people are you do have contact with and seem to be the primary determinants in your care.
Welcome to the “medical ladies,” those women who are usually seriously overweight, a current or “past” smoker whose children have either left or been removed from her custody or does not have children because she parties so much which you hear her talking about constantly if she is not complaining about her life or eating. She is always bad tempered, always too busy to talk with you or answer the phone and is constantly misplacing or outright losing files.
My favorite was the most recent (and staff of the top cardiologists in New York City replete with the New York Magazine covering stating so) when a group of “medical ladies” was gathered behind the reception desk discussing various bars and how late they stayed open and which had the best chicken wings and biggest drinks. Ignoring me they continued their bar discussion at some point a sixth woman in a white coat (that makes them important!) asked if anyone had seen Mrs. So and So’s file who was a patient who needed a new pacemaker, which is generally something a person needs immediately, and after some reluctance to change the beer and wings conversation no one had seen the file and she thought perhaps this woman’s charts had gone in with a Mr. This and That who was probably there for a stress test but now has a pacemaker. I wondered if the surgeon wondered why there was no pacemaker to remove in a replacement job, but she or he I am sure knows how much fun those medical ladies are!
It is these uneducated or in rare cases very partially trained women who run medicine and who by default are your caregivers. These women who do not know confidentiality from constitutionality and who in the outside world would not last as Burger King swabbies and who have absolute control over your health.
Next time you deal with a medical office, ask questions, check your own chart and pray for the time when all of this is totally automated by technology. And just ignore their snarls and mean faces or else order up a burger with fries and a chocolate milkshake which might get you more than the incompetence they demonstrate in the medical office..
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