So this is a total rant. It has nothing to do with any votes last night, but is just my experience of what overcrowded, mandatory, government-run healthcare looks like.
I have had these weird heart flutters the last two weeks on and off and so yesterday I called the Acute care clinic at the Air Force Academy to see what I should do, be seen or what. There's heart problems on both sides of my family and my gram died from heart disease. They referred me to an ER and since we live so far north, they referred me to a regular hospital, not an Army emergency room. I got my friend to watch Jeffrey (walked in the middle of sacrament meeting and had to drop him off and leave, I love good friends!).
Heart issues are one of the top priorities in the E.R. and from the time I got there to the time I got hooked up and had an EKG was about 15-30 minutes. Just like when you have a car and you take it in to a mechanic and it stops doing whatever it was doing, my heart quit doing the flutter thing. They did blood work and found my potassium was a little low and so they gave me some of that. They wanted me to go home but to get a heart monitor today and wear it for 24 hours, they said they could do it today there but that I should check with Tricare to see how they wanted me to do it. Guess how?
I have to have a referral from my primary care manager (who is just a PA and and idiot and asked if I was a stripper one time) for Cardiology. The first appt they were going to have was April 13th. When I actually talked to the clinic they said they could get me in tomorrow to see the PCM but I still had to have a referral for cardiology. I told her the last referral I got took 2 weeks and that the ER wanted me to follow up within 24 hours with someone, her exact words were "That's actually pretty good, they have up to 30 days to give a referral".
So the situation as it stands today, my heart is once again fluttering, I can't see my regular person until tomorrow and probably won't be able to see a cardiologist (if he decides that's what I should do, more than likely he will say no) for at least a week, if it's marked STAT. So whatever, if it doesn't stop in an hour or two I'll be going back to the ER where they care if my heart is beating out of my chest.
However, if I were a soldier and not a "family member" this would be top priority. Like my friend Maratee used to say, "If the army wanted you to have a wife they would have issued you one."
2 comments:
How frustrating! I'm so sorry Tricia. Dealing with doctors, referrals and all can be horrible. I hope things work out soon so you can get the help you need.
I am so glad that you have good friends to help you through these trying times. I hope that the flutters soon pass, or that you can figure out what is causing them. Keep us posted.
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