I had originally been going to the hospital in Galveston for some of my labwork, but the hospital got hit really hard by Hurricane Ike. So I had to go to the Pearland clinic for my genetic counseling and ultrasound.
We got lost on the way there and had to rush lunch. I ended up not even eating because I didn't like my sandwich. My appointment was at 2 for the genetics counseling, followed by the ultrasound at 3. They kept us waiting in the main waiting room for over an hour. I went up to the reception twice to ask what was wrong and to make sure they had me on the waiting list.
Finally they move a whole group of us to a back waiting room, but that did nothing to improve the situation. Now there's just as many people in an even smaller room. And this is the only clinic I've been in that didn't have any magazines, and I forgot to bring in a book.
After 2.5 hours, I was wandering around stretching my legs. I stopped by the nurses' station to look at the schedule and saw my name on it. Finally talked to a nurse and told her I was still waiting for my genetics appointment, and what was going on? She got a worried look on her face and went down the hallway. When she came back, she told me all the genetics counselors had gone home.
That's when I lost it. I was tired, hungry, angry and frustrated. I started crying in the hallway about how I was supposed to figure out if we were going to get an amnio before the ultrasound and now we couldn't do that. The nurse asked if I wanted to reschedule and I blew up at her. Of course I'm not going to reschedule. I took off the afternoon from work and I've been sitting here doing nothing for 3 hours! Why would I want to subject myself to this AGAIN?
Maybe it was because I had a meltdown, but they took us back into the ultrasound room right after that. The tech spent the next hour looking at blobs on the screen and telling me everything looked okay.
The doctor came in, and Daniel yelled at her because of the whole genetics thing. She talked to us a little bit about it, but it's not the same. She said everything looked okay except they found one soft marker for Downs. The femur bone was a little shorter than they like to see. We couldn't be sure of the sex because the umbilical cord was in the way.
On the way out, we found an administrator, and Daniel let him have it too. I'm glad he was there, because I was in no mood to deal with anyone right then. What should have been an exciting visit turned into a hellish one because of their screwups.
Even worse, they never cleaned the bathrooms all afternoon, and the whole place just looked dingy. I wouldn't trust them to give me an amnio there now, anyway.
So that was a rotten end to a good week. On Friday morning, I gave a big presentation I'd been working on for a month, and everyone said it went really well. So I was in a good mood in the morning. Stupid clinic.
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One thing that my dad noticed during his recent back surgery was that, while the actual medical staff was as competent as ever, the clerical bureaucracy had gotten increasingly bloated and incompetent.
Yeah, that's my impression too. I talked to the clinic director today and was a little more reassured that the medical staff was good.
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