My frustration at the institution of medicine at large is growing stronger every day in direct correlation to my rapidly diminishing admiration for some of those in charge. This is not to slander the general population of our health care system, mind you. I'm referring to a select few who shall remain nameless to protect my future welfare. Also, our granddaughter will graduate as a topnotch nurse this May and the local community will be the better for it. My team of doctors, nurses, etc., have taken excellent care of me these last three years so my dismay lies not with them. I'm told I have one more year of treatment to go then we'll see how things pan out. So good, so far, as long as they don't expect any money from a couple of retirees. That's why, when David retired, we purchased supplemental insurance. It is to cover anything Medicare doesn't. Best decision we ever made.
Anyway, my gripe, or frustration if you will, comes not from the medical community, per se, but from those who are tasked with keeping track of everything that goes on. How hard can it be to correctly input medical information into patient records? Is it an inability to read the physician's handwriting? Is he or she hard to understand on the voice recording? A few times in the last year information about my condition has been incorrectly recorded. Why? Is it all inputted by merely pressing a key instead of having to spell it out thereby allowing erroneous information to be recorded for all (I'm referring to the insurance company) to peruse? Luckily, I get the report on my phone app after every appointment so I can catch these errors. At least the ones I can understand, LOL. Most of it I have no idea what is being recorded. With all the big words they use, I could have grown an extra body part and be completely ignorant of the fact which could explain the weight gain. But probably not. I have the normal high school graduate amount of rudimentary knowledge of the human anatomy and no more. If I were interested in how everything works I'd use the internet to find out what I wanted to know since well know how reliable, understandable, and accurate it is.
This is where my blind faith and God are relied upon.
I don't now nor have I ever partaken of tobacco of any kind in any form yet it has been recorded that either I (a) am a smoker or they are (b) ignorant of my (non)smoking history and are confused as to my status. Why? I'm asked every time I have an appointment if I smoke as if I've suddenly developed an interest in doing so since they saw me three weeks prior. The answer is always a resounding NO, Never, Ever, spoken clearly and definitively. Yet, once again, it has been incorrectly recorded for all to see. I fear the insurance company will catch wind of this error, take it for the gospel, and up my already stratospheric premiums. If it ever gets to the mesosphere, I'm done.
It wouldn't be so bad if it didn't take an Act of Congress to get these errors, for which I am not responsible, corrected. (I hesitate to use this comparison as it seems congresspersons these days have a hard time agreeing on anything, but that's for another day.) I, as if I'm the one who made the mistake, have to fill out a form swearing that I do not smoke which is bad enough but the form requires one to name the suspected guilty party. Seriously?!? If I knew who was responsible, don't they think I'd confront them and save myself the aggravation of filling out yet another form?
The last mistake I caught was after a recent Position Emission Tomography, otherwise known to us high school graduates as a PET scan, and it was a doozy. An organ I have not possessed in 50 years has miraculously reappeared. Maybe leaving the tree up for 40 days after Christmas is paying off. Either that or my surgeon just pretended to remove it for the insurance payment. Fooled him, we did. We were young and didn't have any insurance at that time. (They did get their money, eventually. We may have been young and poor but we weren't deadbeats.) I have my oncologist checking into that one just to make sure that either it really is gone or the radiologist is mistaking my scan for another patient's. I sure hope not. That's kind of a frightening thought.
I'm counting down the days until I'm officially declared cancer-free since I've not had any signs of cancer since my surgery in 2019. Fingers crossed.