Fuck! Ok first of all: I don’t care how unassuming your car is or whether you get your haircuts at Supercuts. If you own a business (in this case a physician’s office), and you allow people to wait for an hour past their appointment time before being ushered to a barren exam room and then another 40 fucking minutes before being seen by a Nurse Practitioner (because the Dr was booked solid)-You’ve either got a gambling problem, a spending problem, an overhead problem, or a greed problem.
I don’t take on new clients past the point that I can serve them effectively. You may have guessed that since I am one person, and I have three children, that I might take very few clients. And that I make very little money. Correct you are! Why? BECAUSE I CAN’T ADEQUATELY SERVE the amount of clients I’d need to take on in order to make “real” money. Because it’s FUCKING WRONG to overbook yourself and your business just so that you can make more money. You want to server 200 patients a day? Share your motherfucking cash take (cause god knows this holistic pediatriciain no longer accepts low income insurance plans) with another provider so that your MOTHERFUCKING patients can get in and out.
The irony? I pay cash to see this doctor. (in this case, the NP because I don’t even rate a sit down with the actual doctor anymore) I drive 45 minutes to her office. My son hasn’t been there since he was 2 weeks old. My daughters haven’t been in over 2 years. I’m not a fan of the Well Check. And this is part of the reason why. I would totally go for physicals and the odd lab test here or there (I took my 3 year old to the emergency room last month for a urinary tract infection, even. You know why? Because the wait time at the ER is shorter.) and I would pay cash every time. If the wait wasn’t so insultingly, incredibly, unapologetically long. I get that it’s the winter and the offices are busy with sick people. You can’t predict sick people right? Well except for the fact that EVERY SINGLE year this happens when school starts and the weather gets cold.
So. Instead of getting my 105 dollars per well check per kid times 3 kids times however often they should get them (in Jack’s case there would have been 2 or 3 since May, right? Plus LittleA’s 3 year, plus TeenHer’s yearly), they got my 75 bucks today and my solemn promise that I will never, ever go back to that building. I wonder if I’m the only one.
If that wasn’t enough of a reason, this enlightened remark by the NP during the exam might do the trick:
“You didn’t breastfeed? I wonder if you’d breastfed, if all this could have been avoided.”
What happened to house calls, by the way? And tact? Are those things obsolete, in this new age of factory style assembly line business?
(BabyJ is fine, by the way except for a raging yeast infection and a scaly covering of eczema, despite the hypoallergenic formula and lack of baths. My new theory is that BabyJ has inherited my allergy to construction chemicals.)
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