Playing Fair and Being Kind

I just got off the phone with my cardiologist’s office. I called them to tell them I was not going to drive to the hospital for a scheduled follow-up appointment this afternoon. I had decided that I could do just as well by talking on the phone to whomever I was going to see. My rationale was that nothing was going to be done to me, the medical person did not need to see me in the flesh, and the weather was shitty, and the drive was one hour one way, and my return trip was going to coincide with rush hour traffic through Wiscasset. Plus I’d had a very busy morning and I was tired.

There was the equivelant of, “But, but, but…” from the other end of the line. I held my ground because in the process of going through all of the thought processes to justify my changing the appointment to a phone call I realized something new to me. That is, that the cardiologist gets paid a pretty penny just to have me show up on schedule, sit in their office for a few minutes, be attended to by a nurse for vitals, share a few pleasantries while the nurse does this, and then sit for another few minutes waiting for the cardiologist to show up in a cloud of busy professionalism and ask me how I am, scribble a few notes in a folder, and then wish me luck. Firm handshake and goodbye. Nice to see you and all that.

To me this is a scam. Almost every follow up appointment with every doctor I’ve needed has been just like I described. Slam, bam, thank you, Ma’am. That’ll be a hundred bucks. In the case above I needed to tell the cardiologist how I was doing after they adjusted my medication. One word: “Good”. I would prefer to have them pick me up by my ankles and shake me down for all the loose change in my pockets. That would at least be entertaining, don’t you think?

Adding insult to injury is this. I will not be talking to my cardiologist. I’ll be talking to the PA who works for her. You see, any question I have with any real import will be referred to the cardiologist because the PA will not have the answer. Or if he has a good answer he will still have to get permission from the cardiologist to utter the words out loud. So I sit here at home feeling like a rebel knowing that the office personnel and the PA and the cardiologist are sitting around in a group trying to figure out where they went wrong with me. Some tongue clucking and head shaking will occur and it will be all over. I win.

G. M. Goodwin
August 22, 2018