Tales of Bad Doctors

Recently I was chatting with a good friend when he said that his vision was blurry and double when he moved his head.

“What could cause that?” he asked.

“A brain tumor,” I replied automatically, with little concern because I was sure it wasn’t a brain tumor.

“It’s not a tumah,” he said like Arnold Schwarzenegger. “What if my glasses prescription is bad?”

“Well, then go get your fucking eyes checked,” I said.

He instead went to the doctor, which was the right decision because it turns out he indeed has a brain tumor.

Flash forward a couple weeks and he’s had a biopsy on the tumor. The guy can’t catch a break. The tumor is cancer. Now he’s referred to an oncologist at the Nebraska Medical Center.

All of my doctors are affiliated with the Nebraska Medical Center, and I have outstanding doctors. It’s the cancer center of the region, so I was confident my friend was in good care. However, the oncologist was cold, unsympathetic and completely clinical in speaking with my friend and his wife. She flatly told him that the MRI a couple days earlier showed that the cancer had spread and he would have to have chemotherapy three to five times a week.

My friend has been incredibly tough through this brain tumor, and he’s kept a very positive outlook. He’s never once felt sorry for himself, and he’s kept his twisted sense of humor throughout, saying that it is a tumah, and joking that the tumor is the twin he consumed in the womb. When he and his wife left that oncologist’s office that day, however, he cried like a little boy. She had made the outlook sound so horrible.

He switched oncologists and has a compassionate, caring doctor this time, and his positive outlook is back, for which I am thankful. But how can that mean, uncaring doctor still be in practice?

This incident brought to a head my outrage with lousy doctors in the last few months. My sister recently started going to my gynecologist because she wasn’t happy with the two she’d been to in the past. My gynecologist became alarmed at how high my sister’s blood pressure was and told her she wouldn’t continue her prescription for the pill because she could have a stroke.

My sister’s blood pressure was no higher this year than it was the last five or six years she’s gone to gynecologists and a general practice physician. Those doctors told her that her blood pressure was high and she should go back to have it rechecked. She never did, and they never cared. They never told her the numbers or that it was dangerously high, or that she could have a stroke in her 20s. I want to seriously hurt those doctors for risking my sister’s life.

After her appointment with the gynecologist, my sister made an appointment with my regular doctor, a wonderful guy who truly cares about his patients. I feel much better knowing that she is under his care, and with a combination of medication and diet modification, her blood pressure is finally under control.

My experience with a doctor who should be slapped was a few years ago, but I didn’t realize she should be slapped until the last couple months.

About three years ago, I went to a doctor other than a gynecologist for the first time in 14 years because I had shingles on my face. That’s how I found my wonderful regular doctor. Something was terribly wrong with my face and he was the doctor available when I called the clinic. It’s pretty unusual for a 31-year-old to have shingles, so he was trying to figure out what was going on with my body. I had a lot of symptoms of thyroid disease and I have thyroid disease on both sides of my family, so he drew blood to test for that. The thyroid test came back fine, so he looked at other conditions with my symptoms.

He deduced that I was suffering from depression. I was convinced he was wrong, but I had to admit that he wasn’t the first doctor to diagnose that. Even my gynecologists, after thyroid tests came back normal, suggested depression.

I was certain he was wrong, but he was so damn nice about asking me to just try the meds. He even said he may be wrong, but we won’t know unless we can rule it out. So I tried the meds. But I still wasn’t convinced it was depression. I had nothing to be depressed about. And I wasn’t sad. My “depression” reared its ugly head as anger, irritability and general meanness.

After doing some reading, I was certain that my thyroid was the culprit of my symptoms. I also found out that the thyroid tests a regular doctor does can come back normal and you can still have thyroid disease. You have to go to an endocrinologist for a full workup.

So I made an appointment with an endocrinologist. She was a bitch. She looked at me and told me that if my doctor said it was depression, then it was depression. She didn’t do any other tests, and she sent me on my way.

Flash forward two-and-a-half years. My antidepressants don’t work and I’ve maxed out two drugs because they stop working after six months. I’m irritable and hot all the time. The North Pole is looking like a good spot for a summer home. My doctor takes blood for thyroid and hormone tests, and voila! It finally shows up.

My thyroid isn’t just a little off, it’s waaaay off. And if that stupid bitch had done more tests two-and-a-half years ago, she would have found it in the early stages. I want to punch her in the face every time I have a hot flash — and I have hot flashes several times a day.

My story has a happy ending, too. I am now under the care of a very good endocrinologist, and hopefully I will feel better soon.

But just because my friend, my sister and I have happy endings doesn’t mean all is well in the medical world. Yes, we have found some great doctors, but we never should have had to endure the awful ones. They shouldn’t be practicing medicine. At least not on living humans. If they can’t have compassion and listen to their patients or just know what an unsafe blood pressure is, then they should be practicing in a lab or on cadavers. Cadavers don’t care if you’re an uncompassionate bitch or if you don’t know their pulse is nonexistent.

What my friend, my sister and I have learned is that we are in charge of our health care. If a doctor is abrupt and hurried and won’t take the time to give us our money’s worth from the visit, then that is not the doctor for us. I want a doctor to tell me about a drug they’re prescribing, tell me the possible side effects and dangers. I want them to explain the condition I have, even draw little pictures like my good endocrinologist did.

Patients need to stand up for their rights. You pay good money for insurance and health care, and you should be receiving good care in return for that money. I think if more patients stood up for their rights and demanded quality care, doctors like the lousy ones I’ve mentioned wouldn’t have any patients to treat poorly.

My Dream Job

The company I work for is almost finished building a luxurious new building out in the middle of a cornfield west of Omaha. Employees are scheduled to start moving the middle of this month. The problem is that in the two years it’s taken to build the company’s new home, the staff has already outgrown it.

I secretly think this is funny because the new location is a much longer drive for me and more than 80 percent of the employees. The head honchos tried to tell us that the location was actually closer for most of us, but the truth quickly came out: It’s closer for the head honchos, who can afford to live out there and who could afford to pay to drive 30 miles or more each way to work. Thus, I was not the only person dreading the drive and who thought the fact that the building was about 100 seats short was some kind of sweet justice.

The company did come up with a sensible solution for those 100 seats, though: telecommuters. I especially think this is a sensible solution because I was selected to be one of the people to telecommute from home.

With my mild agoraphobia and sluggishness in the morning, getting out the door is a daily challenge. I live for the weekends, when I don’t have to leave my house. I have no trouble staying at home for days on end. In fact, my ideal situation would be to stay home forever and have groceries and anything else I need or want delivered.

Telecommuting … I don’t have to get dressed or put on makeup in the morning? Yippee! I don’t have to drive! Hallelujah! I can just wake up, go downstairs and start working? Hell, yes!

My co-workers were jealous. They, too, wanted to work from home. Then they thought more about it and some of them decided they would miss the people. Won’t you miss the people? Won’t you get lonely? they asked.

Now I was faced with how to politely say, “no.”

I said things like, “Oh, I’ll still come in on Wednesdays for our team meeting.” Or “I can always call you if I get lonely.”

But I was really thinking, “Nope. I’ll be just fine. Just me, two cats, and hours and hours of quiet. Heaven.”

I don’t need human contact on a daily basis. I’m not a very social person, and frankly, I prefer my own company to most anyone else’s. Generally e-mail is my preferred form of communication. I call my sister because I like to talk to her and she knows how to keep a conversation brief. I call my parents because they make me feel guilty if I go too long without calling them. I call my brother when I feel like talking to him or need my car fixed. And I rarely call friends.

For business, I’ve learned that a phone call sometimes goes further than e-mail, so I’ll call certain colleagues when I need to. But the last time my boss ran our phone usage reports, I had logged 2.75 hours of calls in three months.

Furthermore, my job — writing and mostly editing — demands quiet. Just try focusing on a long document about boring software with noise and chatter around you. Then people come chatter in your cubicle. Soon I just give up on trying to do my job. My preferred work environment is silent but for the clacking of my keyboard. No music, no telephone ringing and especially no chatter.

Whether my preference for solitude is innate or learned is probably debatable. When I was growing up, my family moved around a lot. I was awkward and didn’t make friends easily, and when I did, I didn’t understand the catty, bratty behavior of little girls. I was alone a lot of my childhood. I actually preferred the company of adults — teachers, my mom’s friends, my friends’ mothers. (At slumber parties, I would sit in the kitchen talking with my friend’s mom while the other girls played. I didn’t like kids even when I was a kid.)

My brother and sister were a few years younger than I, and they were only a year apart, so they were very close, and again, I wound up alone most of the time. I went to three different high schools (in three different states), and while other teenagers were out with friends and dating, I sat in my room listening to R.E.M. and Jane’s Addiction, reading a novel a day. I didn’t want to be alone during those years, but that’s how it was.

Now I prefer being alone. Sure, I went through a few wild years after high school when I found friends and was never home. But eventually I reverted back to being alone — by my own choice this time.

I’m looking forward to telecommuting to have a quiet environment with fewer distractions where I can be more productive. Some people who are required to telecommute are angry, however; they don’t want to telecommute. My thought is, who doesn’t want to telecommute? But these are gregarious sorts of people who thrive in social situations. I’m not saying they are popular in social situations, because, honestly, some of them are twats who piss off everyone around them. But they like being around people.

They are not, however, more productive around people. Frankly, I think they’re pissed about telecommuting because they won’t be able to hop from cubicle to cubicle chatting about nothing to do with work.

I suppose time will tell whether telecommuting is a good option for my company. For me it is my dream job, and I will savor each day of solitude.