Measuring Up: Doctors, Writing, and Expectations

Well, this isn’t an entry that is completely about the wonders of the Sierras.  Today, it’s just about . . . a rough day.

I called a doctor’s office to get an appointment today.  I’ve called the office two times this month and they kept telling me “we don’t have her calendar yet, we don’t have her calendar.”  I asked them when they would have that calendar and, for the first call, they said that they didn’t know.  On the second call, they told me to call on July 31^st at 8:30 a.m.  Well, today is July 31^st, so I dragged my lazy butt out of bed and called at 8:25 a.m. (just to be safe).  The office’s answering machine wouldn’t put me through and it wouldn’t let me wait on hold.  Okay.  Fine.  I call again at 8:30 (exactly!) a.m. and get put on hold for twenty minutes.  When the woman answers, she’s rude, she’s confused, and she makes drill sergeants look like fluffy teddy bears.

After this, she informs me that all the appointments for this doctor are filled.  I tell her that I don’t understand how this happened because I called exactly when they told me to call.  She responded by saying that there were 36 people waiting on the phone for appointments and they filled the book.  By the way, she’s yelling at me by this point.  Again, I don’t get how this could be.  Now, she’s yelling and talking over me.  I should let you know that, naturally, I’m a very nice and patient person.  But, I just couldn’t take her yelling over me.  I finally said, “Can I please talk?  Am I allowed to talk?  Are you going to let me talk?”  She seemed suddenly taken aback.  I asked to speak to her manager.  Anybody want to guess how that went?  Yeah.  It went just as badly.

The manager had the gall to tell me that all the people on the line had the same health problem that I have (which is quite strange since I never told her my health problem) and that she’s just as upset as I am about it.  I told her that I highly doubted that and she proceeded to denigrate me, mitigate my health problems, interrupt me, talk over me, and just be a you-know-what.  Needless to say, I won’t be going to see that doctor.

I called my other doctor who recommended me to this idiot doctor, and I ended up crying on the phone to one of the front desk ladies.  She was super nice and comforting, but I never cry about things like that.  Heck, I had an organ yanked out of me last year and I didn’t cry then!  But, for some reason, being treated so horribly and be treated as subhuman really got to me.  I ended up having to call the nice lady back because I couldn’t get through my story.

I wish that doctors and their offices like that one remembered that patients are people.  We have families, we have names, we have favorite colors, we have lives.  We’re not numbers.  We’re not charts.  We’re not faceless paydays for you.  Bottom line: we’re human beings.  Please treat us as such.

I’m also having a bit of trouble with my young adult novel.  Since I scratched a bunch of stuff and it needed to be longer anyway, I decided to do Camp Nanowrimo.  Here’s the link: http://campnanowrimo.org/.  It’s essentially a site that encourages people to write.  You set a goal for how many words you want to write in one month.  Usually, the goal is set at 50,000 words.  Then, you write and record your progress on the site.  I’ve actually really enjoyed it.  Then again, I love to write.  Nanowrimo typically takes place during November, but since that’s the absolute worse month to take on a novel, I was glad to see that the website offers an event during July.  I’m, of course, behind on my word count, but that’s okay.  I feel a word storm brewing in my gut.  That’s right.  A word storm and it’s banging against my innards and ribs wanting to get out.  Okay, that image made me even go a little “bleh.”  😛  No more gooey body imagery for a while.

I don’t know, I guess with being behind on my novel and today’s disastrous experience with a doctor’s office, I kind of feel like I’m not measuring up to some nebulous bar hanging above me in the ether.  Maybe it’s silly.  It’s unreasonable to assume that I can make people treat me with common courtesy, or at least not yell at me for no reason.  I don’t know what else I could have done in that situation.  I certainly didn’t curse any of them.  Although, upon further reflection, maybe I should have.

With regard to the novel, I am working quite hard on it.  It’s just taken so many twists and turns that, when I first wrote it, I could never have expected.  I love writing.  I’m just afraid that I won’t measure up to the potential that many people believe that I have and that this novel’s idea deserves.