Tag: life Page 9 of 15

Left work again at 2 to try once again to see a doctor about my ear. This time, things went fairly smoothly. Ended up seeing the same ENT’s office that I saw for my ear infections last summer, but I still had to fill out all the paperwork again.

Once I finally got seen, the nice doctor was able to flush out the obstruction and I can HEAR again! yay. Being half-deaf was very alarming, and not something I really want to go through again soon.

I also got to talk to the doctor about my ongoing sinus problems, and he’s agreed to see if we can make an impact on them. I have a prescription for a nasal steroid and an appointment to see him again in a month. Going back to square one with a new doctor gives me some hope that maybe this time we’ll make some progress.

We’ll see. Meanwhile, I feel much better now that my ears are empty and unblocked. Especially since the post brought me new CDs to listen to. I now have a replacement copy for the soundtrack from Spinal Tap, the soundtrack from Avenue Q, and Billy Bragg and Wilco’s Mermaid Avenue and Mermaid Avenue Volume II.

Those last two I’d been looking forward to for a long time. If you haven’t heard the story, basically, they took a bunch of unrecorded Woodie Guthrie lyrics that had been found among the late folksinger’s papers and effects, set them to music, and recorded them. Some really nice stuff on the first one, so far.

When they decided to refer to me an ENT yesterday, they chose the specific doctor to refer me to based on the fact that it was an office I’d been a patient of in the past. This would be easier for everyone, since I already knew them, they already knew me, I would be in their system, and so forth. This made a lot of sense, even if it meant having to drive down to Sandy Springs rather than finding an ENT who was actually in Alpharetta.

So this morning, I drove down to the Mount Vernon Medical Centre…a familiar drive, since I went to see this particular doctor every 2-4 weeks for over six months. I parked, took the elevator to the third floor, walked around to the corner office….and they weren’t there. It was another doctor’s office.

Hrm, says I. Oh well, maybe I misremembered the floor. So I tried again on the fourth floor, the fifth, the second. Having worked my way back to the lobby, I consult the directory, and discover the reason I cannot find them.

They aren’t there. They’ve moved out of the building.

Admittedly, it’s been a year almost since the last time I was here. Checking the referral form, I find no address, but a phone number. So I call it.

Amazingly, in 2004, you cannot actually speak to a human being at a doctor’s office. Not knowing which of their several locations I wanted to get directions to from the voicemail menu, I tried to connect to their appointment line. And waited on hold. For 20 minutes. All the while being assured that there was “one call in front” of me.

Giving up, I called my primary physician’s referral coordinator and left her a message, and then drove to his office, where I sat in the lobby until she was free to see me. To her credit, she’s always been extra-special-wonderful, and managed to get me a new appointment for 2:30 pm IN Alpharetta, at a location that I actually know the address of. So life is better than it was.

But what a frustrating, and ultimately wasted, morning.

Spent a large part of today sitting in a waiting room for a doctor to take a look at my right ear, which has been stopped up since Saturday. Despite arriving 20 minutes early for my 11:30 appointment, I didn’t actually get seen by the doctor until around 1pm. After looking, he decided that I really needed to see an ENT to get the blockage scoped out. No one they could contact to refer me to had an appointment earlier than tomorrow morning, so I’m still effectively deaf in one ear. This isn’t painful, but it is somewhat disconcerting. As a musician and music lover, the thought of losing my hearing is one of the more terrifying ailments I can imagine. I imagine that a good irrigation will leave me just fine, but until then it’s strange and I don’t like it.

I must remember to take my own book tomorrow. The elderly magazine selection (According to Newsweek, there was a break-in at the Watergate building. Someone should look into that!) was barely adequate to keep me interested for a 90 minute waiting room stay.

Truth is, I just don’t like going to see doctors. I don’t actually dislike doctors. Heck, I have good friends who are doctors, but I prefer to limit my exposure to them to social occasions, and not spend much time with them in their professional capacity. I think a lot of this is a result of the continuing failure after three years to solve my sinus troubles. Nonetheless, I’ll be glad to get this done with and go back to my reasonably healthy life.