Thursday, June 01, 2006

Doctor Update

I started my day at 6:00 calling to get appointments. I finally got through at 6:20, and the man told me he couldn't give me 5 appointments just to get throat cultures, so he would give my information to the nurses' station, and they would somehow book us all together for a shorter amount of time. Sounds good, right? So I dutifully hung up to wait for the nurse to call back, since they don't open until 7:00. Fortunately, Bob was much more aware and cognizant at this early hour, so he suggested that I call again and at least get me an appointment, since I am really the one that has all the symptons and am very uncomfortable. I did that, getting an 11:00 appointment. At 7:45 the nurse calls me and tells me that there are no appointments left, so there is no way to get any throat cultures for us. She brightens up when I say that I have an appointment. "Well, let's just see if YOU have strep! It's probably jsut a virus anyways." Then she asks the ages of the boys and says they don't do throat cultures on kids under 5. Hmm.

We troop off at 10:15, and I saw a really nice doctor who took 2 cultures, one for the long test, and one for the 10 minutes one. Surprise, surprise, the 10 minute one was positive, so I'm back on antibiotics. I can't believe this--I have been sick more in the past month than in the past year! I guess I really am just sort of rundown from nursing, and therefore more susceptible.

So now I am trying to decide if I will try again with the boys tomorrow. Nathan and Luke are not exhibiting any symptoms at all, and I can't decide about Caleb and Jonathan. They don't seem 100%, but they are not complaining about sore throats, running a fever, or anything, and with the clinic's bizarre no-culture policy, it doesn't sound like they would even culture them if they weren't showing definite strep symptoms, which they really aren't. Grrr.

I don't know if I'm up to another trip out to the clinic tomorrow! We had quite a time getting home today. The Beltway was slow because of looky-loos rubbernecking an accident on the shoulder, and then Rt. 7 was COMPLETELY closed because of some huge crash involving an overturned semi trailer and some cars, from what I could see before we had to turn off onto some little side road with a million other cars to wind and wend our way back to recognizable roads. It took over an hour to get home. Whew! Good thing I wasn't sick or anything.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

I sooooooo despise 'looky-loos rubbernecking'. I mean I really get my panties in a wad over this. Think how much gas and time was wasted during that whole thing. I bet it would run into the hundreds of thousands. Think about everyone who was late to work, late to an appt. the gas wasted stopping and going.

Okay...guess you now know that's one of my pet peeves!!

Hope you get to feeling better. Pam