Jessica had to go to the emergency room last night because every doctor we saw over the past few days, starting with an ER doc in Los Angeles, said she probably had appendicitis. So we spent seven hours waiting to see a doctor after hours, waited a couple more hours for a CT scan, and then found out it's not appendicitis but "just" an infection. So, that's good I suppose.
What's really frustrating is that Jessica saw our primary care physician yesterday morning and was told to just wait to see if it gets better but to go to "urgent care" that night if it kept hurting. That's completely insane, but it sounded ok to us at the time. Our doctor should have ordered the CT scan herself during normal business hours. Then we could have found out there was no appendicitis without wasting 10 hours in hospitals last night. Our PCP also should have kept Jessica on the antibiotics that the first ER doctor prescribed on Sunday night, since it turned out to be an infection rather than appendicitis after all. Finally, our PCP shouldn't have told us to go to urgent care! All they did was make us wait two hours, push on Jessica's stomach, and then send us to the ER where we had to wait five more hours. We should have gone straight to the ER if appendicitis was suspected, since there's nothing an urgent care facility can do in that circumstance.
Overall I'm very disappointed with the decisions of our primary care physician. If Jessica had gotten the CT scan yesterday afternoon we could have discovered the infection and spent a normal evening at home.
We went through hell with our primary and our initial specialist with my wife's intestinal issue. I think she was pushed around for various tests and postponed appointments for months while she couldn't sleep or eat and was wasting away. Finally, after another appointment where the specialist had to wait a few weeks for tests, we just started calling specialists directly, took the first one we found with good ratings, and withing three days, she was in the hospital being operated on to removed a destroyed intestine. Had it burst, it could have been fatal.
The primary specialist had such an ego that when my wife pointed out the pain was not where he thought, he berated her! Unbelievable.
I have had my taste of socialist medicine (HMO) and no thanks!
I need to learn to proof read before posting!
Hey Michael..sorry to hear about that and good to hear that its only an infection. Having said that, I'm just recovering from an infection in my toe and its been awful.