Primary Care Doctor Visit - Something is Amiss

 June 2020 - Primary Care Doctor Visit and Pelvic Exam

At the beginning of June I went and saw my awesome primary care doctor. 

He did a thorough assessment. He listened to my history, took a urine sample called a urinalysis or UA, and it showed blood in the urine microscopically. 

He verified that it wasn't a urinary tract infection, and then did a pelvic exam, making sure that the blood wasn't vaginal. 

It wasn't. My reproductive system was healthy and well, and I wasn't on my period, so no blood was currently coming from my uterus. This had to be coming from my urinary system.

He told me that he wasn't too worried about this. He said that most likely it was just a polyp in my bladder, but that he wanted me to go see a urologist. I needed to get a scope in my bladder to see what was going on. 

 

August 2020 - What's going on?

When I had gone to see my primary care doctor, he told me that they were going to make a referral to the urologist. The urologist’s office would then call me to schedule an appointment. They stressed that I would need to be patient, because everything is moving very slowly.

Remember June 2020? This was still in the early months of the COVID shut-down. 

If you can arrange it, try not to get cancer in the early stages of a pandemic when nobody knows what's going on! LOL! 😂

The governor of Oregon hit the panic button, and shut everything down here in Oregon. Nothing was working well. Things that were open were functioning at a snail pace.

By August (about a month and a half after I had seen my primary care doctor), I thought I had waited long enough. I called my doctor, and they assured me that the referral had been made. They told me to call Dr. B's office (what I will call my first urologist), to ask what is taking so long.

I called their office and they said “Oh I’m so glad you called. We had a wrong phone number on your referral sheet.”

Ummmm… why didn't you call back the doctor that referred me to you, get a better phone number, or goodness, send a letter by snail mail??? 

Has anyone else noticed that COVID-19 has made the whole world more incompetent? Is it the stress? The high turnover in jobs? Not enough people coming to work?

 *sigh*

This should have been a warning not to go here. So, so many things went wrong at this practice. If you have some warning signs, please pay attention to them! Change providers! 

But I chalked it up to COVID (nothing anywhere seems to be working well), and to a simple mistake. Everybody's human. What’s the hurry anyway? This was probably much ado about nothing.

The next available appointment was in two months - October.

I didn't know what to expect at the urologist the first time I saw him. I was hoping we would get right down to business and get a CT scan. Next article is about what to expect on your first visit to a Urologist.