Tuesday, March 24, 2009

You people drive me nuts!

So the Friday before leaving on the cruise I saw this guy for back pain. Since I manage my own patients no matter where I am, I had to deal with him all week on my trip.

He wanted an urgent MRI (his request, I didn't feel it was medically urgent). So the weekend after his Friday appointment he called my closed office 5 times to see if we'd scheduled it yet (sorry, sir, your crappy HMO hasn't opened their authorization department on a weekend just to accommodate you). But on Monday, my nurse, who can work miracles, somehow got an authorization expedited just to shut him up.

So we got the MRI mid-week. I personally called him Friday afternoon from the cruise to go over his benign results. He demanded that I do "Something! Anything! Just fix me!" (for the record, sir, doing so is beyond the skills of the best psychiatrists). So I told him I'd order physical therapy.

So this past weekend, apparently forgetting that Crappy HMO, Inc., isn't open on weekends, he called 3 times to see if his physical therapy had been set up yet.

My secretary called him Monday morning to schedule his physical therapy. He told her that he'd decided at the last minute to go on a 3 week trip to visit some old college buddies in Idaho, and would call us when he got back.

2 comments:

DBO in AUS said...

Can you prescribe a course of high colonics?

Grumpy, M.D. said...

Seems like a good punitive measure in this case. Unfortunately, we were unable to do so as the patient's head was obstructing the orifice.

 
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