You Know You Have a Bad Doctor When He Can't Remember He's Ever Seen You Before

by Corrine
(Dallas, IA)

I'd always had good experiences with doctors until we moved to Tennessee and tried to find a new doctor. My husband finally found one who would take us. However, when we went to see her, we were sent to the other doctor in the same building instead. He seemed pleasant enough, so we decided to continue with him. After all, all I needed was renewed prescriptions every so often.

Unfortunately, I didn't realize then that I would experience terrible allergies in that part of the country. I hadn't been there very long until I started feeling all the miserable symptoms. Since I was already taking two medications for allergies, I didn't see the doctor about this problem. I just continued to tough it out. However, I got sicker and sicker, and shortly after Thanksgiving I knew I couldn't go on any longer. My husband scheduled me an appointment the next day.

When I woke up that next morning, I knew I was too sick to wait for my appointment. Instead, my husband took me to the emergency room at a nearby hospital. After checking me over they announced that my white count was 21,000, I had double pneumonia, and they were going to admit me to the hospital. They said they would notify my doctor that I was there.

All that day I saw no one but an occasional nurse who took my vitals or gave me a perfunctory breathing treatment. The doctor never came in to see me even though there were only eight patients in the entire little rural hospital. The following day, Saturday, another doctor made the rounds. He was nice and stopped to talk with me about my illness. On Sunday my own doctor managed to poke his head into the room. He may or may not have even glanced my way. "You will be able to go home tomorrow," he said. "Make an appointment to see me in a week." That's the only time I saw him while I was hospitalized.

My husband scheduled an appointment for me in a week as we'd been instructed. By the time the appointment arrived, I was still very sick. However, I got dressed and we went to the office in time for my appointment. There were very few people in the waiting room, and I prayed that my wait would be a short one. However, I wasn't taken into a room until four hours later. When my husband asked one of the girls behind the counter what was up, she told him that we'd just have to keep waiting.

Finally we were shown into a room, but it wasn't an examination room. It was apparently used as a combination storeroom and surgical suite. We sat down on the edge of an unmade cot, because there were no chairs in the room. No one closed the door while we waited, and we saw the doctor running up and down the hall and laughing with his office girls. I kept feeling worse and worse.

Finally, after sitting in this room about an hour, the doctor rushed in. "Who is my patient?" he asked. I reminded him that I was. "Why am I seeing you?" was his next question. I told him that I'd been in the hospital for pneumonia and that he'd asked to see me in a week. "Oh, you're that one. You're fine now, though." End of conversation. He didn't listen to my lungs or anything, and we went out to the counter to receive our bill for $260.

That visit had totally worn me out, and I obviously wasn't fine. In fact, two days later I was back in the emergency room where another doctor told me that, as is often the case, my pneumonia had progressed into bronchitis. We never went back to that other doctor again and could never understand why others continued to see him even though they admitted that he was pretty bad.