Friday, November 2, 2012

You Don't Have That Lead on Correctly

So anyone who reads my Facebook post knows I've been complaining about Dr. J's current schedule a lot.  It's a rough one, 30+ hour calls every forth day where he gets no sleep at all, all weekends working, and only getting four days off in the whole month.  Today is one of those days.  But when you only get four days off a month you really have to pack a lot of stuff into those days off.  Today he had an appointment with the medical company filing the report for the underwriter for life and disability insurance he is applying for and a dentist appointment.  The medical tech showed up at our house at 6:30 this morning.  (I'm going to clarify this right now by saying this is my perception of how this whole thing went...so Dr. J if the ordering is a little wrong or the wording is a little off, give me a break :)  The appointment started off bad because he went pee when he first got up.  The first thing she needed, a pee sample.  Unfortunately that well was dry.  "Well," she told him, "you can drive up to our medical lab today at noon."  "Great," he said, but he didn't mean it.  Then he comes up to ask me if I know where he blood pressure cuff is.  "Should I know where it is?" I ask with scrunched up eyes.  It's still only 6:45 and I'm desperately clinging to those last 15 minutes I should be allowed to sleep.  "No," he says, "but the techs cuff isn't working very well.  I was just hoping she could use mine."  Five minutes later he was back upstairs to grab our scale, "Hers is measuring really light," he tells me.  By then I'm starting to get up anyways.  I put my gym clothes on, wake my two oldest up, and grab clothes for the two youngest that have been up with dad since six.  I drag myself down the stairs.  The technician is gone and my husband tells me this story...

"So she gave me a EKG, but she had the leads on wrong.  I look down at the print out and said to her, "You know you don't have that lead on correctly."  "What do you mean?" she says, "This is how I was trained."  "Well it's not on right.  It should be here."  "Well I've been doing EKGs for a year like this an no other doctors have said anything" (she's been doing the medical test for the underwriters of the AMA life and disability insurance).  "Well I don't know anything about that," he says, "but it should be like this."  And he shows her the correct placement.  Well she looks it over and then pulls up the box/instructions and sure enough there is a picture right on it showing the way he connected the leads.  "Oh," she says.  But then she puts the tape with the incorrect lead placement into his file.  So at noon today after I'd run at the gym, Dr. J had gone to the dentist, and we'd picked Peach up from preschool we drove up to the north side to the lab for Dr. J to do his drug test.  "Didn't she offer to come back to your house?" the girl at the front desk asked when Dr. J told him why she was there.  "Nope," he said, "And just so you know she didn't know how to use the EKG machine.  She does now but she put the incorrect strip in my folder, and she said shes been doing them wrong like that for a year." "Um, OK, well I'm going to talk to my supervisor about that," the girl says.  Fabulous!  So what I'm wondering is why did it take a year of these test before someone realized she hasn't been doing it right.  Have the other doctors just been spacing out during the exam.  Has the insurance company been denying these people with the abnormal EKGs or using them to insist on higher premiums.  Have they just been ignoring them and if so why are they even doing it.  Just a few questions I'm never going to get any answers to....

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