5 Reasons I will not go to the Doctors/Hospital

I’ve been an asthmatic my entire life, not just a regular one, a bad one. So I’ve spent about half of my life in doctors offices and hospitals and from all my experiences I’ve come to the conclusion that most doctors are incompetent and the hospitals they are a part of are worse.

Reason 1: Billing.
Case: Their billing is awful. So awful, it makes you depressed and makes you want to /wrist, but if you /wrist, you’d end up there again and potentially with more bills so it’s not a valid alternative. Why is it — that when I go to ONE appointment on lets say 9-21-2010 I get 4 different bills? Why do I not just get ONE bill in an easy consolidated form showing what my insurance paid and what I have due? How is it that out at least one of these four bills has to get lost in the mail and I’ll get a call going, “Why havent you paid your bill?” where you will then have a lengthy dialogue about how you never received the bill, a person on the other end of the line going, “You know, if you can’t pay it, we can work something out…” and you getting angry because it was never an issue of you being ABLE to pay it, but merely that you never got the bill and now you’re mad because they are trying to say you’re the incompetent one. This is assuming you get a call at all and don’t just happen to be using freecreditreport.com and notice that you have some mysterious medical collections that you don’t even remember even seeing.

Hey, guess what Hospitals, I’ve been going to you my entire life and YOU ALL have this problem. I’d also like you to know that it’s SO DAMN BAD that my Mom who has gone to court MANY times over bills she never received has WON every single time. Even the judicial system knows what fuck ups you are. She started saving her bills religiously  because she noticed on bills how you would bill her for the exact same thing multiple times. You greedy bastards.

Pro Tip: 1 BILL, from 1 SOURCE. I’m tired of going to a hospital and then receiving a bill from “Notthehospitalyouwenttoo” here where you’re like, “Hm, how did these people get my information and I never saw them?” This makes me not trust hospitals.

Reason 2: They will attempt to run 20,000 different tests on you even if you know what is wrong with you.
Case: I had been a chronic asthmatic for years. At the age of 12, I had a really bad attack from long-term exposure to a cat and had to be whisked off to the emergency room. This hospital could not treat me due to the severity of the attack and I was whisked off to a speciality hospital for children known as “Riley’s Hospital for Children” in Indianapolis, IN by ambulance. Once there, a particularly incompetent doctor when faced with my severe breathing, previous admittance to the other hospital FOR ASTHMA,  and adamant parent that it was an asthma attack, she said I needed a very painful procedure called a spinal tap and wanted to review my injuries from a go-kart accident I had had two months prior that involved something below the waist down and nothing to do with my lungs. They also insisted on during the peak of my attack, that a catscan was necessary. I was passing in and out of consciousness and a catscan was indeed what my dying lungs needed. Not to be kept still and relaxed, nope, I needed to be carted around away from life saving paddles. Then, emergency room aside, when I finally made it up to ICU they decided that every test in the world needed to be run on me — from health tests relating to my diet to a sweat test of sorts. A phrase I heard multiple times? “It’s okay, she has double insurance.”

Reason 3:  Something painful must occur.
Case: I swear, I could walk in there feeling healthy as an ox and for some reason I will have some form of torture and/or pain inflicted upon me.

Doctor: “How are you feeling today?”
Me: “GREAT! This is the first time I’ve felt this good in awhile. Those medicines are really working.”
Doctor: “Mmmk. Well we’re going to need to run some blood tests, I’m going to need you to do some additional PFTs, and I’m going to insert this abnormally large needle into your ass because I’m feelin’ bored today.”

I always walk out with a shot it seems. I could go in there for medicine refills and walk away with bandages.

Reason 4: A lot of doctors are douchebags.
Case: Now, I wont claim to be the easiest patient. There is only one doctor in my life I’ve even remotely liked and that’s because he was the only one that sat down next to me and asked me what was going on. I mean literally sat down and listened. However, that’s one of… hundreds. In fact, I’ve had a doctor walk in there and literally say, “I’m the Big Kahuna around here.” This is literal. It actually happened. I stared at him in disbelief and immediate dislike. He then proceeded to tell me, an asthmatic of 16 years, with a pulmonologist, that there was not a difference between inhalers and nebulizers and that my pulmonologist was wrong. Sure, the medicine is the same, but how the medicine is distributed and the effects that this distribution has is very different. It they were so god damned similar, when I went to hospitals they wouldn’t give me TREATMENTS with Albuterol and Proventil, they’d give me more puffs of my inhaler.  Not to mention that you, Mr. General Doctor, are not a SPECIALIST whose  had 40+ years of experience in the pulmonary fields.  … STFU.

This was one of many douchebag doctors I’ve encountered.

Which, by the way, thank you Government for making CFC inhalers illegal. Now inhalers don’t work at all. So when I’m dying for breath on the ground because my inhaler has virtually no effect and I still wheeze like crazy afterwards, I’ll remember that it was you who condemned me to such a fate.

Reason 5:  No one listens.
Case: This ties back a little bit into the former statement of only ever having one doctor actually listen to me, but it is serious. The best doctors are the ones that listen, even if your patient is going on and on. This isn’t just doctors, though, this applies to nurses as well.

When I walk into a emergency room hunched over because I can’t breathe and I can’t complete full sentences and you sit me down and start asking me questions about who I am, where I live, do I have insurance … WHAT THE FUCK. I’m sorry, yes, let me sit here and answer those things for you while I’m suffocating slowly like a fish out of water. Then, when I finally answer all your questions through wheezes and gasps, please, lets move to the back room in a wheel chair where I for some reason get to sit and instead of getting my albuterol right away, I get asked MORE questions until finally the doctor comes in and goes, “Um…” and a respiratory therapist is called because — god almighty, the woman whose lips are turning blue from answering all their questions does need medicine stat.

When I look at you, a nurse, and say, “Hey, if you put that IV in the crevice of my elbow, you will never be able to give me medicine through it and it will hurt like hell.” Then, they sit there arguing with you about it even though say, “Listen, I know this for a reason. I used to have it done all the time and they’d just have to take it out and put on my hand and because either they couldn’t use it or it hurt so bad that I couldn’t stand it.” I mean, there would be a debate about this. I’m assuming they didn’t want to do this because it’s harder to do an IV in your hand, but I’m sorry, I’m only going through the pain once.

When I sit there and tell you I can’t breathe, don’t encourage me to continue on with a PFT. I once went in with a mild asthma attack and because of the PFTs I ended up getting admitted. I had to do it so many times (for what reason I still can’t remember) that it actually made my lungs become sore and soon after my asthma went from mild to worse while sitting in the car right after a treatment and I turned around and had to be admitted. Why would you make me do that so much that my lungs become SORE and the oxygen deprivation almost causes me to faint? Oh, no, you’re right, you know better.

When I’m sitting in a bed, not allowed to move, after being stuck repeatedly by one of your new nurse trainees and blood got all over my shirt because she couldn’t do it properly after sticking me three times, and I’m freezing cold  and suffering from the albuterol tremors and say, “Could I please have a blanket?” Do not come back 30 minutes later with said blanket. This is happened a multitude of times where all I wanted was a blanket and as soon as they walked out the door I was forgotten about.

There you go. 5 reasons that even though I’m a chronic asthmatic, I will never, ever go back to a Doctor’s office or Hospital again. Ever. AND STOP TRYING TO STEAL MY MONEY YOU BASTARDS.