Thursday, December 11, 2014

"Most Widely Used and Most Irratating Message in Use in America Today"

"Please stay on the line. Your call is very important to us" I suspect that almost every patient spends at least 2 hours whenever they call their Doctor or in my case today, a perhaps highly overrated Moffitt Cancer Center in Tampa, Florida. There is no way you can talk to your doctor without going through a series of  "If this an emergency, Please stay on the ....Your call is very..... and on and on repeats with seldom an opportunity to talk to a human voice. Often different phone numbers are given to you read by somewhat saying these numbers so fast you cannot record them so you need to repeat the whole process again.

When I may be through at Moffitt, I plan to write a complete detail of my experiences which at this point are not awesome. For example, I was to have a procedure this coming Monday and Moffitt Scheduling was to call me the hour time. Yesterday, I received a call cancelling my Monday appointment "because they are just so busy at this time of the year and on and on....." I then asked when my appointment would be she said "I will need to get my appointment book and call you back". What, you don't have your appointment book with you when you call me to cancel me?? It is now 24 hours and no one has called me back so I am down here in a city I don't care for, Tampa, and I can't get through to my doctor because his nurse hasn't called me back. Dr. Poch said he would answer any questions I had but I can't talk to him because he is "working with other patients".

Dr, Poch here at Moffitt says I don't have cancer but I still need 6 weeks of treatments that only have a 20% success rate, but two months ago my doctor in Peoria said biopsy showed I still had cancer and I needed 6 more weeks of treatments that only had a 23% success rate.

With the exception of a number of doctors like Dr. David Rodenberg of Peoria, I feel that the recording "Your call is very important to us......." is IMPORTANT because for many of the younger doctors it appears mainly to be the money and the prestige of  being called a 'doctor' of whom most of the younger and some older nurses, are in AWE..

I might as well say more, had I followed the Doctors advise at Anderson Hospital when I had my Tia, I would have most likely bleed to death internally, when I got to Moffitt Clinic, they had me wait almost 2 hours only to find out he was the wrong doctor; then had to wait 3 1/2 hours to see the right doctor. It appears most everyone at Moffitt in the waiting room has been waiting for hours.

Oh, well, blame it on Obama plus everybody dies sooner or later (and that may be my case because of my age), some sooner that they should.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Nice praise for Dr. Rodenberg. He was a prince to my mother, and I will never forget his many kindnesses. Good luck to you.

Anonymous said...

Blame it on Obama? Really? How about blaming it on the for-profit medical establishment that we are burdened with? Past time to institute a single payer model.