Damn Doctor!

My regular Doctor will be back in his clinic on Monday and MAN am I pleased.

He took a holiday (first time in ages) and headed to Italy with his family. While he was gone, everytime I rang his clinic (he works from home and had a Locum taking care of things) I would get an answering machine telling me to call back at such and such a time.

The first time I was calling at 11am on a Monday morning. The answering machine told me ‘I’m very sorry but the clinic is unattended right now. Please call back after 9.30am on Monday morning’.

Now where I was it was WELL past 9.30am and I should have at least gotten a damn receptionist!

The second time I called I was told that they were currently too busy and to please call back in 5 minutes. IT’S A COUNTRY TOWN CLINIC! The town it is in has a population of 50 people!

Fuck me.

After many more days (where I was thanking god I wasn’t actually sick or anything) I finally got a receptionist. She told me that she was busy right now, could I please hold? 10 minutes later I was still holding, only I wasn’t listening to music, I was listening to her wander around her office making coffee and talking to the doctor.

Then, when I finally heard her heels walking towards the phone and I thought I was actually going to get to talk to her, she hung the phone up. Without checking to see if I was still there.

I rang back.

And got a freaking answering machine!

You should have seen my ears smoke. Nathan says it was funny.

So I rang back again, and rather snippily told her that I had JUST rang her to ask for an appointment. I got an appointment, but not until she blamed ‘someone’ for hanging up the phone. I should have told her that I could hear her the whole time.

But the straw that broke the camels back? I went in when I was first pregnant (May 23rd to be precise) and got all the necessary paperwork done to be sent to the hospital.

[Basically here, you go to your GP, get a positive pregnancy test and then promptly get referred to the Hospital for a booking in appointment with the midwives and then a health and well being check with the doctors. Then if all looks good, you get cleared to continue seeing just your GP until you are 36 weeks. High risk pregnancies don’t have this option and need to go to the OB’s at the hospital for every appointment]

I had to ring the hospital a fortnight ago to cancel a GYN appointment I had, while the lovely lady was checking the appointments and congratulating me on my pregnancy she noticed something odd.

Despite having seen the GP weeks before, they had no record of an antenatal referral for me AT ALL. I asked her to check again and she did, she even went so far as to check through all the recently received paperwork that hadn’t been entered into the computers yet.

Nothing.

So I of course, rang the GP [Locum, remember] to try and sort out what the fuck had happened. Do you know, I haven’t been able to get in touch with him! When I do finally get my call answered, I got told that the current receptionist knew nothing about it and could I call back when the other girl was working and they had had a chance to talk to the doctor please?

Fuck ME!

So I didn’t bother. I figure I’m not going to die between then and when my regular GP gets back to work (Monday, sweet sweet Monday) and I will go see him then and get everything sorted out.

No matter that I will be nearly 11 weeks along by the time I get to see him. No matter that it takes up to 8 weeks to get an appointment at the hospital. No matter that everything that counts will have been done by then, even though the hospital won’t know I exist.

Dammit, I just want to see my regular GP and have him sort everything out.

So my advice? Never trust a Locum, or the receptionists when their boss is on holiday, because you won’t get anywhere.

—-

So far everything is still going well. My abdomen continues to expand with intestines and stuff, while my uterus remains pushing hard up against my spine [my hip and lower back are protesting this quite a lot].

I cannot wait for this first trimester to be over and for the nausea and exhaustion to stop. I want to be able to feel the baby move so I can stop thinking morbid dead baby thoughts. I want to feel certain that at the end of all this, I will have a real baby to take home.

I am still definitely pregnant and heading closer towards the time when I can schedule a NT scan. I want to be able to discuss my dates vs my ultrasound with my REAL doctor.

And there is some other stuff going on here that I can’t blog about right now, but it’s big and it isn’t pleasant, so any good thoughts you send my way won’t go to waste. Trust me, send the good thoughts. We need them.

xx