There’s No Coming Back From This
And I’m okay with that
March 31, 2023
Today I fired the one senior staff member of my medical team. It would have been four years in May that he had been a team member.
Every night for at least the last week I haven’t been able to sleep. I’ve been up tossing and turning, with every thought imaginable going through my head. I had an appointment this morning at 9 AM. I called at 8 and canceled it. I was really going to try to go and just suck it up and deal with him and all that comes with it.
I just couldn’t do it.
I had hit a wall. I tapped out. I’m beyond finished at this point. I run through the last several months and the best I can tell the downward spiral began last summer. I was in the dermatologist's office and told her about my itchy scalp. I was, what I thought, forever running my nails through my hair and scratching my scalp, sometimes to the point of breaking the skin and drawing blood. She took one look and said it was stress related.
She gave me a script for some drops to run through my hair whenever I felt the itch coming on. Mind you this is when I was at my sickest last year so she really wasn’t surprised. But something just didn’t sit well with me so I began keeping tabs on the itching. I wanted to see if I could figure out what the trigger was so I could eliminate it.
The only time it happened were the mornings I was getting ready to go to his office for an appointment. Well damn.
So I kept 70s CDs in the car and would rock out for the 30-minute commute to his office. Once in the waiting room, my knee would start to bounce. Anxiety. I’m not sure but I think I held my breath from the time they called my name to head for the exam room until I got back outside again. But he was a good doctor and I was getting better. Besides at my age, I had a lifetime of dealing with jerks. I’d just have to find a way to deal with him for the sake of decent healthcare.
Until he started to suck as a doctor too.
It started several months ago. I was lying on the table getting injections for pain. I don’t know what he hit but my pain level when from the baseline of 5 to 1000 with one needle stick. I punched the wall at the head of the table. A couple of visits ago, the same thing, only this time I cried through the whole visit. The pain was that bad. Again, not my baseline reaction to injections.
Last Friday a different doctor gave me six shots in my lower back, three on each side of my spine. Shot #5 caused me to beat the hell out of the O.R. table. And nope, not my baseline reaction that time either. For the last couple of days, my left leg has been dragging behind me like Quasimodo. For more than a week I’ve been high as a kite around the clock. Muscle relaxers during the day and Tylenol 3 with codeine at night.
I used to not have to really take all that much if anything during the day. At night it would be two Aleve and a heating pad. None of that works at this point. I’ve talked to my insurance agent about getting someone in here to help me with laundry, trash, etc. since I’m struggling to do it all myself now. Can I just tell you how pissed I am that at 60 (as of 3/29) I need help and am moving like I’m 80?
And it happened on his watch.
I would try to talk to him but he was busy and didn’t have the time. We discussed last fall about how his practice had become a MASH unit. Get ’em in, get ’em out. Treat ’em and street ’em as the saying goes. He said he was going to talk to the hospital and get some OT approved and that he wasn’t taking on any new patients any longer plus he was no longer going to squeeze people in aka double book.
Today he’s only working half a day and I had been double booked for 9 AM. So I already knew the place was going to be a madhouse and again there would be no time to talk about my concerns or how my health was declining. So I called at 8 AM as soon as they opened. Naturally, I got the answering service, I apologized and said that I thought the office opened at 8. She said they did but hadn’t started taking calls yet. 🙄
So I gave the service my name, DoB, and said I wouldn’t be going to today’s appointment. 915 I get a call from the office and that I hadn’t shown up and to give them a call back if I wanted to reschedule. Second call to the office this morning and I asked them if they had gotten the message from the answering service, no, and “sometimes they (meaning the office staff) forget to turn the answering machine off”.
So he’s not the only one dicking up over there. This is the same crew that didn’t check his office mailbox on the regular and I had to ride his ass like a show pony to locate a letter I had mailed two weeks prior. It was a formal write-up about one of his staff members and her incompetence. I don’t get anything but junk mail but at least I check my box once or twice a week! I can’t imagine a doctor’s office not checking their every damn day.
But all of this is happening under his watch too. It’s his practice. He’s allowing this shit to happen. He can do what he wants to do. It doesn’t mean that I have to participate in the chaos or negligence. When I had his phone person on the horn and she wanted to know if I wanted to reschedule,
“No. I’ve fired your boss today and have already replaced him.”
And just like that a friendship and a relationship were over.
I believe it’s time for me to fly.
