"I don't care what's best for a child!" in A new beginning

I swear we have the most selfish, inconsiderate patients my God. Yesterday was just a nightmare. I’ll spare you the long details but I tried going to lunch multiple times but every time I tried someone needed something from me. The last time I tried, the switchboard operator called and against my better judgement I picked it up. “Hey, I have a patient of Dr. “President’s” on the line and he is on for surgery Thursday and he is very unhappy with us. He said if he doesn’t get his surgery time right now he is cancelling his surgery. Ok here he is!” wth.

So to explain, we can’t set the schedule until the afternoon before because we get last minute emergency add ons all of the time which makes the schedule constantly change because you have to schedule the cases keeping in mind putting insulin dependent patients and children first. Then, the order after that point would be larger general cases (with a numbing block), then general cases, then MAC cases, then finally local cases are last. So you can see how it would be impossible to give anyone a surgery time far in advanced. And we tell patients this while they are in the office as well as I tell them during preop AND we have it written in BOLD on their prop instructions so it’s not like they are totally blind and don’t know this. You would think telling them THREE times would be enough. So I pick up the call and right off the bat I can tell he’s slurring and says “Yeah I am not very happy with you people. I have waited and waited and I STILL don’t have my surgery time.” I calmly explain to him that this is why we tell patients that we don’t give their arrival time until the day before because that is the soonest the schedule can be set because we get emergency add on cases and if we have a child or diabetic then they need to be put first.

“I don’t CARE about what’s best for a child, I only care what is best for ME!”

Well I guess at least the asshole was honest. I asked him if he needed to know because of transportation reasons and he said “No. I just want to know.” So then, he goes on to tell me he wanted his surgery first thing in the morning and I tell him that right now the way the schedule is set there are two large emergency cases that the surgeon had to do before his and that as of at that moment his arrival time would be for 10:30 but I could not guarantee that wouldn’t change from the time I am speaking with him to the time the schedule is actually set but that we can try to keep it at that time as best we can barring any cancellations or emergency add ons. He slurs, “Well that is the earliest it’s going to be right? 10:30 on?? I can’t have it any earlier than that because I am NOT a morning person ok!!!!” At this point, I want to slam my head against the desk and sell my soul to the devil. I’m not at all surprised he was flip flopping because he is obviously inebriated on something that I wish he would have at least had the decency to share. He obviously also had a touch of the crazy so that tends to complicate things too. Another thing he wanted known was hat the anesthesiologist better not try waking him up and better let him wake up on his own because he has hit people when they have tried after past surgeries. I told him he should tell the anesthesiologist this when he comes in Thursday. So I put in bold not to move his surgery time so my poor coworker wouldn’t have to deal with him flipping his shit on her and can you take a guess on what happened? Yeah his surgery got moved to the afternoon and the locals were moved to the morning which doesn’t ever happen! This scrub tech did it I guess because equipment wise they needed it done that way but thank God she told me that he came in for an anesthesia consult today and was fine when she told him his arrival time. She said he was very pleasant. Of course he was. Maybe he was sober today, who knows.

Then, yesterday they decided to close early (which also never happens) due to the horribly icy roads so I called this one woman to do her preop and she didn’t answer so I left her a message and was totally courteous and let her know that we would be closing early at 3:30 due to the weather and the roads being dangerously icy so if she got the message after that I would call her first thing the following day. Well, she calls back at 3:25 and gets my voicemail because I was doing another preop on the other line and says “Yeah I know you are supposed to leave early and all but I really need to get this done! Call me back so I can get this done okay!” Yeah okay B I’ll do your preop and just go jump in my car and die afterward. Who cares as long as you get your preop done to get rid of that little cyst on your finger. I’m sorry I don’t mean to sound like such a bitch but I’m just so sick of people’s complete selfishness.

To make up for those two patients yesterday I did actually receive two compliments today. I had one woman who I spent over 20 minutes doing her preop on, thank me and told me it was so great to have someone in the medical field that she could tell actually cares. And she is right, as much as I complain about work I really do care if they have a good experience. I try to be as pleasant and as thorough as possible and if I don’t know the answer to their question I ask the physician. I also always ask if they have any questions and if they don’t and think of any to call me and I give out my direct line even though sometimes I end up regretting it. haha. I really believe that is how anyone in healthcare or customer service should behave. Unfortunately in the many other offices I deal with on a daily basis as well as the other doctor’s offices I go to myself this is not the case at all and I know firsthand how much it sucks as a patient having to deal with that. Being a patient, you shouldn’t have to deal with that kind of unprofessional attitude. I had another man tell me “Man you are too good at this!” If he only knew I was just a medical secretary a couple months ago and am nowhere near close to being a nurse. haha. But seriously, though I can do this job in my sleep now and have all of the long ass instructions and preop questions and protocols memorized now. Of course since lithium manager’s plan has backfired she was telling some people in another meeting that I have been training with the woman in billing that does all of our surgery authorizations to do all of the auths for the hand surgeries as well as the auths for all of the DME supplies. wtf. 1. That is not true and I have no idea where that came from. and 2. I don’t even have enough time to get PAT and the surgeries scheduled let alone add some more time consuming shit to the mix. Calling and speaking with insurance companies as you can imagine is not something that is a quick process. So of course the reason she is doing this is because I yet again have proved her wrong so she is going to add another thing on until I make a mistake or get fed up and quit. My coworker is the one that told me about this and agrees that is what she is trying to do. She hasn’t spoken to me about it yet so I am trying not to get too pissed off about it but she has some balls telling that to the CFO and billing supervisor when they both knew that wasn’t true. ugh. Why does this woman have to be so NUTS? She needs to just become a patient already.

Onto some better news…we are going on Saturday morning to look at that house I was talking about in my last entry. I’m excited but trying not to get my hopes up. It is a short sale so I’m not sure how more difficult it’s going to make the process and with us being first time home buyers I don’t know if that makes it worse either. Anyone have any knowledge or have any firsthand experience about short sales? I do know that the house was originally listed in September and just recently the seller bumped $15,000 off of their asking price. Everything is completely renovated too. It is seriously perfect and the price…well, we will never find anything at that price with everything we are looking for, and completely done either. But I guess we will see when we go and see it on Saturday. Any advice or knowledge on short sales or home buying/loan information would be much appreciated. I really don’t know much about this kind of stuff other than the things I have found on google and the things my mom has told me from her own experiences. My husband had spoken to a loan company a couple months ago and they said that if we had applied that we would have been pre approved but that it would look better if we had a down payment in our savings even though we don’t need to being first time home buyers. We have been slowly building up a savings but aren’t there yet. Thanks in advance though!