appointment | Unmotherly Insights

You are still coming to your appointment? Aren't you???

I know times are tough. I know Doctors have been given the shaft. They’re getting squeezed by the government. They’re getting paid less and less by insurance companies. Patients are suing them over mis-diagnosed hang nails. It’s not easy. Believe me, with a husband in the biz, I see the problems within the healthcare industry on a daily basis.

But still, this is ridiculous. Doctors need to suck it up, pull themselves up by their bootstraps, and stop wearing their hearts on their sleeves. Showing your sensitivity and exposing your insecurities may be the ticket for dudes on the prowl, but it’s not an attractive physician feature. So I’m sorry if you docs out there are feeling insecure, but don’t be so obvious about it.

I do realize that people are flaky and often forget about appointments. I think that confirmation calls are a fine way to insure your schedule stays on track and doesn’t end up with holes the size of the Grand Canyon. But what’s with requiring patients to call back and confirm that they received the confirmation call and will actually be at the scheduled appointment? It’s a pain of colossal proportion and I resent it immensely.

I used to joke that my dentist had abandonment issues because he was the only one I knew who participated in this silly double confirmation call policy. I found it annoying albeit slightly amusing. But the practice has caught on and it seems that everyone from the kids’ orthodontist to the chiropractor is requiring patients to call back after receiving their reminder call to reconfirm their intention to show up at their appointment. Really?

It’s kind of like sending a thank you note to a bride for her thoughtful note of acknowledgement over the Lenox place-setting you sent her. It’s like an endless, interminable cycle. And honestly, I don’t have time to call back every friggin’ doctor my kids have appointments with. Look, I took the time to make the appointment. I’m a responsible adult. Have a little faith in me, for gosh sakes.

I know that life is tenable. Relationships are fleeting. Disappointment hurts. But, you can’t live your life worrying that everyone in it is going to let you down. It’s just not…healthy. This kind of cloying neediness is unattractive and I’m telling you, it’s gonna drive people away in the long run.

Trust that you are important and that people will show up at their scheduled appointment times . Believe in your own internal value. You don’t need this kind of redundant external reinforcement. Your good enough. You’re smart enough. And gosh darnit, people like you.

The doctor is in...if you're willing to wait a few hours.

In a million years, you will never guess where I stood in line this morning at 6:30a.m.

Go ahead. Try.

Ticketmaster for tix to see the next popular, but sold out Garth Brook’s concert?
No.
Top-rated, coveted charter school to secure a spot for my boys for fall 2011?
No.
Hip new yoga studio for Swami Krishna’s hot yoga flow class?

No.

I stood in line at 6:30a.m. to reserve an after-school therapy appointment for spring and summer for my eldest son. I’m not joking. In order to snag a 4:00p.m., every-other-week appointment, we had to line up, with a host of other patients, outside the doctor’s office for more than an hour prior to the office’s opening.

Has the world gone mad? Queuing up at a psychologist’s office, (who not surprisingly does not take insurance), as if we were trying to get a table at Pizzeria Bianco? I felt like a complete moron.

But what choice did I have? I’ve tried taking my son out of school during the day for what we like to call “talking doctor” appointments. It’s an utter disaster. The conspicuous nature of an early school departure creates so much anxiety in my son that it renders the therapy session completely moot. They need to spend the whole 50 minutes talking him down over his missed class assignments and never get an opportunity to address the deeper, more pressing psychological issues that are causing him distress.

So instead, I opted to wake up at 5a.m. in order to be on the road by 6 and in line by 6:30. We ended up being 2nd in line behind a woman in a folding chair with a thermos of hot coffee who looked as if she’d possibly slept there the night before.

Her son had some serious psychological challenges and she confided that she’d been queuing up like this for 12 years! She confessed to hating the almost humiliating “groupie-esque” process the office insisted on using in the name of fairness. But this doctor had saved her son and helped them to restore some semblance of peace in her family. At the end of the day, it was worth the quarterly degradation of standing on line to secure a post 3p.m. appointment.

We did manage to procure a coveted 4pm spot. And I suppose, if all goes well, I’ll be back mid July with all of the other patients, vying for a 4p.m. fall/winter spot. Those are even harder to get I was told by one of the other veteran moms in line.

Not sure why this irks me quite as much as it does. I guess it sort of takes the personal relationship feeling out of the therapy equation for me. But I’m not the one who needs to feel connected to this doctor. My son really liked him and felt he was someone he could talk to.

So I guess I’ll just accept the fact that being a parent is a lot like being a place-holder in the long line of life. You stand around a lot, wait for something allegedly great to happen, and then, you pay through the nose for whatever it is you thought would solve the problems that ultimately end up working themselves out in spite of your consistent interference.