Where did the file go?

Is it baked into a cake?

You may recall my melt down of about a month ago, wherein I had screwed up my courage to inquire into pain blocking injections in my back. I put in serious time waiting for appointments with doctors who would refer me to a doctor would assess the wisdom. 

All the damn protocols! But I waited out all of them, got the referral to an appropriate physician, made the phone call for an appointment, and blam!

Straight up against a scheduler with no empathy and her own protocols. Without the file of a certain doctor who currently is incarcerated for molesting his patients, no appointment. The fact I walked out of that doctor’s office during my second appointment, shaking off people who wanted me to make another appointment, and throwing down the note the doctor pushed into my hand, “I only want you to be the best you can be!”, without his notes Ms. Gatekeeper would not schedule an appointment.

I steeled myself, went back to the bad doctor’s office and requested my records. I opted for the cheaper course of having the bad doctor’s staff fax them, and left. I did not sit down the entire time. I tried again to get the appointment scheduled, but until those records were in Ms. Gatekeeper’s hand, no dice.

I called the referring physician’s secretary and explained my dilemma. We conspiratorially agreed she would refer me to another doctor and I would never mention the bad doctor to anyone, ever, again. The plan worked perfectly; the only drawback being the additional one month wait to see a new pain management doctor, which I did today.  

The assessment over, the procedure date set, I came home and found a message from the original Ms. Gatekeeper. Actually, I did not recognize her name and could not conceive of why she called, so I called her back.

Will you believe they have not yet received my record(s) (plural only because it was the second visit wherein I stood up and left the doctor sitting in the exam room) in order to schedule my appointment. I sighed deeply and told her I was OK with waiting until they showed up; she could call me then.

As I hung up and chuckled I realized those records probably were subpoenaed and are in some attorney’s storage room. Who knows? Who cares? Payback….