Is there a doctor in the house?
It wasn't bronchitis. Well, it might have been in the beginning. Now it's a good old fashioned sinus infection.
Or tuberculosis. Given the quality of my current health care, it's hard to tell.
I spent NINE HOURS at the clinic yesterday, arriving at noon and finally walking out with a prescription at 9pm. Nine hours. Even I can't read for that long, even though I had figured on a five-six hour wait and brought two books. It's also hard to read when an intercom announces names and room numbers loudly and in Spanish every two minutes. (Somehow, a foreign language is even harder to tune out than your own.) Plus, there is no "now serving number 35" system -- like at, say, your basic deli -- so you don't know where in the queue you are, and the paperwork, visit, and precription all have several steps that are distributed over seemingly random intervals of time, and you don't want to miss your name being called, so you're effectively trapped in the waiting room for the duration.
If you thought that sentence was long, try reading it for nine hours.
Of the million and five patients who got seen before I did (and no, this wasn't an emergency room), two seem emblematic:
1) The diabetic woman who turned out to not feel well because her blood sugar was 600. Hello?
2) The man who wandered around the waiting room holding his stomach, occasionally bending over and making horrible, deep, LOUD retching noises. I've never heard anything like it; granted, of course the person I've most often heard retch is myself, and I'm not a large man. At least he made it into the intake area, behind a closed door, before actually spewing anything.
What's an otherwise healthy young woman with a cough and a cold, really? A nine hour wait, that's what. Well, what do you want for $65?
In further indignities, the doctor prescribed me antibiotics without telling me they interact with birth control pills, and the pharmacy gave me an inhaler instead of the nasal spray they were supposed to. Of course, I didn't notice the latter oversight until I got home, so I get to go back to the damn place.
Is this what socialized medicine is like? If so, maybe I don't want it after all. (I will accept answers from people who are currently living in socialized medicine countries and using the public services, not from crazed US libertarians, wealthy Republicans, or people with private insurance who've heard the public stuff is really bad).
Meanwhile, I've been up for over an hour draining all the liquid in my body out my nose. You're welcome.
It wasn't bronchitis. Well, it might have been in the beginning. Now it's a good old fashioned sinus infection.
Or tuberculosis. Given the quality of my current health care, it's hard to tell.
I spent NINE HOURS at the clinic yesterday, arriving at noon and finally walking out with a prescription at 9pm. Nine hours. Even I can't read for that long, even though I had figured on a five-six hour wait and brought two books. It's also hard to read when an intercom announces names and room numbers loudly and in Spanish every two minutes. (Somehow, a foreign language is even harder to tune out than your own.) Plus, there is no "now serving number 35" system -- like at, say, your basic deli -- so you don't know where in the queue you are, and the paperwork, visit, and precription all have several steps that are distributed over seemingly random intervals of time, and you don't want to miss your name being called, so you're effectively trapped in the waiting room for the duration.
If you thought that sentence was long, try reading it for nine hours.
Of the million and five patients who got seen before I did (and no, this wasn't an emergency room), two seem emblematic:
1) The diabetic woman who turned out to not feel well because her blood sugar was 600. Hello?
2) The man who wandered around the waiting room holding his stomach, occasionally bending over and making horrible, deep, LOUD retching noises. I've never heard anything like it; granted, of course the person I've most often heard retch is myself, and I'm not a large man. At least he made it into the intake area, behind a closed door, before actually spewing anything.
What's an otherwise healthy young woman with a cough and a cold, really? A nine hour wait, that's what. Well, what do you want for $65?
In further indignities, the doctor prescribed me antibiotics without telling me they interact with birth control pills, and the pharmacy gave me an inhaler instead of the nasal spray they were supposed to. Of course, I didn't notice the latter oversight until I got home, so I get to go back to the damn place.
Is this what socialized medicine is like? If so, maybe I don't want it after all. (I will accept answers from people who are currently living in socialized medicine countries and using the public services, not from crazed US libertarians, wealthy Republicans, or people with private insurance who've heard the public stuff is really bad).
Meanwhile, I've been up for over an hour draining all the liquid in my body out my nose. You're welcome.
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