Off Topic Rant

Not about kids, microtia/atresia, adoption, or the usual.

How to annoy your health care provider:

Saturday afternoon. Office hours are over. It's the weekend. Call the office. Leave a message with the answering service that you need a medication renewed. Your health care provider looks at your demographics and medications in the electronic medical record, and assumes that it's one of the medications that regulate blood pressure or cholesterol. In other words, important.

Even though it's not an emergency-emergency, health care provider returns the one call, only to find out that the patient needs his prescription for Viagra 100mg renewed. It's Saturday night, after all.

THIS IS NOT ANYWHERE REMOTELY CLOSE TO AN EMERGENCY, it's so far from one, though it will be come one when the HCP has irritation leads to her having an MI. After she decides whether to laugh or fume.

Damn Pfizer, damn those Viva Viagra commercials.

And because the health care provider doesn 't feel like contending with further phone calls or wasting time or breath giving a lecture on what is the nature of an actual emergency, the prescription is renewed.

This gets filed right up there with patient who called the answering service on a Thanksgiving Day a few years ago needing a refill of her Premarin. Perhaps a few hot flashes would help her roast her turkey and help her remember to renew her medications during normal office hours. (And I will admit to being a chump and renewing the prescription; my bark is much worse than my bite.)

But because HCP is annoyed, no refills on the Viagra prescription. Patient can tick off one of the health care provider's colleagues on another Saturday afternoon.

I hate being on call sometimes, though it does provide material when I have nothing else to write about. If nothing is happening I'll have to recycle the poison ivy on the privates story (another patient on another Thanksgiving Day, a tale whose lesson is sometimes you should sacrifice privacy if you cannot recognize poison ivy before relieving yourself in the woods) or the compound swear word story from the days of working in prison.