Health care at its finest

For months, my primary care physician has been nagging me to get an appointment with a urologist. I’ve had three kidney stones, and even though I haven’t had one in four years—four years!—she tells me I have to have a urologist in Chicago. They’re hard to get into, she says. You have to have one in case you have another kidney stone. Blah blah.

So the morning of my last doctor’s appointment, I made the appointment with the urologist so that she would stop nagging me (she called it persistence). And that appointment was today at 3pm.

I always hated going to my old urologist in Indy. I was the youngest person in the waiting room by 50 years, and the only woman. All the old men put their golf magazines down when I walked in. And really, I’m so glad I could give them that breath of fresh air, but I’d rather be in just about any other doctor’s waiting room.

There was a little more diversity in this waiting room (though I was still the youngest by a few decades), but it had a few strikes against it before I even saw the doctor: it shared a waiting area with the Alzheimer’s Disease Center, so I picked a chair facing the other direction because I really can’t deal with sad. The lights kept flickering, and I kept imagining that some poor Alzheimer’s sufferer was confusedly flipping switches somewhere (your mind goes to funny places when you have nothing to read but Money or Golf magazines). The receptionist had given me a pager—the large blinking kind you get at some restaurants—and mine finally went off 20 minutes after my scheduled appointment time, just as my brain was turning numb from reading about investment strategies.

I met a nurse in the hallway who introduced herself by way of giving me a cup to pee in. She showed me to an exam room, where a toilet was sticking out from a cabinet beneath a sink. Like this:

After another 25 minutes—this time I read an Esquire article about experimenting with steroids, which at least was interesting—a woman came in and introduced herself as a physician’s assistant. My doctor had gone home sick (which I hope explains the 45 minute wait—that had better not be the norm around there). She looked through my files and gave me some photocopies about low oxalate foods, which list pages of nutritious and delicious foods to avoid, including sweet potatoes, squash, and spinach. Clearly they are smoking crack if they think I am giving up sweet potatoes. (On the plus side, most berries appear on the list of bad foods, which means I can now tell people that I can’t eat them for fear of kidney stones, not because I think they taste disgusting. Yes, all berries. Yes, I know they’re different.)

So finally a doctor came in and explained that he wanted to determine my risk level for kidney stones. They’d do a CAT scan and then my favorite, the 48-hour pee test, in which you save all your urine in bright orange jug—in the refrigerator, mind you—for two 24-hour periods. The physician’s assistant emphasized that they’d like me to do this during the course of a normal day, when I’m working or at home. Yeah, no way in hell am I putting my pee in a biohazard jug in the work fridge. Are people who work in urologists’ offices really that far removed from reality?

The doctor, a young smarmy guy, told me that they’d have to do a pregnancy test before the CAT scan. Me: I’m not pregnant. Him, smarmily and patronizingly: Oh, I know you’re not pregnant. I just have to do the pregnancy test.

So a nurse comes in to take my blood (I can’t just pee on a cost-efficient stick?), and I assume that I’ll get sent over to the CAT scan lab afterwards to wait in a long line with other grumpy people who need to have pictures taken of their insides. Except… I have to wait a week to call just to schedule the scan. And… why the fuck are they taking my blood one to two weeks before the scan? That is plenty of time for me to go and get knocked up, and for them to harm my unborn child.

All that, and they didn’t even have fun band-aids.