Y'all know I lost my neurologist back in June and have been dealing with the issue of either being acknowledged by the "new" neurologist at the University hospital, or find another neurologist with the required referral from my primary care l for a different health system. That was to take place in January when my primary care was to return from "medical leave". It was for a "procedure" he hadn't been able to do because of the COVID19 Apocalypse . . .
I found out today, my primary care Dr passed away over the Thanksgiving weekend.
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CrazyCatWom
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i'm so sorry. it's stressful to deal with illness without the added worry of finding adequate treatment. my heart goes out to anyone with a death in the family, but around holidays is so much tougher. i hope you'll be able to get a referral still.🤗 (not trying to sound insensitive to the doctor's family.)
I know, I feel so bad for and have been praying for his family, his staff, colleagues, and his patients. I felt awful having to deal with rescheduling an up-coming appointment and having to talk to someone within the health system about a "replacement" doctor, because that just didn't seem right. I had called for an entirely different reason! Because I'm on Medicare, the health system he was a part of has a nurse who calls me once a month to assess my case. I hate being leashed to an scheduled phone call, so when the nurse hadn't called at the time she'd scheduled with me, I waited an hour longer and called her. The number instantly went to hold music. Finally a human picked up and asked why I was calling. I explained about the monthly call nurse Joslyn was supposed to do, and it then went on to a wierd back and forth over why was I calling Dr______, but no, I was trying to call the nurse . . .
And since the person working (what I suspected)was the switchboard of the Women's Hospital was latched onto the idea I was calling the Dr, she told me I would`nt be having my January appointment because Dr passed away.
I was so stunned, I kinda just went along with the statement, "Let's get you rescheduled with another Dr, and did so, though I have no flippin' clue when or with who.
UGH! Stay away from me! Just set up the rolls of barbed wire around the house and retreating to the bunker! LOL! Sorry, thought they both died. Sorry, you'll get through it.To self, just shut up and stop saying sorry. Really, you'll get through it. Just more work. And you never know, a new Neuro might be a blessing? Sometimes the new one hasn't been set in his/her ways and has the latest info!
That is so sad and stressful and complicated and irritating. It is so difficult to connect with a primary doctor and a neurologist. I pray you are able to connect with two that connect with you.
oh no! thats so sad. I know how hard it is to find a decent Primary care Doc. I have been thru a few over the past year and a half. One had OD'd me on my thyroid medication by prescribing 10x the dose i normally take, then blamed me for taking it. She also billed Medicare for a telehealth appointment to tell me that as well as am office visit that never happened. I went back to my old PCP and a few months after that he left practice altogether. I finally found another that would telehealth/virtual and she is driving me insane. LOL. I am looking for another doc because of it. I tried to get a refill on one of my thyroid meds and she refused it less than 10 days after i saw her because i didn't have a follow up scheduled for next year yet. What? I don't even have bloodwork due until late January.. UGH.. Anyway, I hope you are able to find a new doc and get the referrals you need quickly. This can be maddening i know.. Good luck in this
I know it is all so maddening! The primary care doctor who passed away was the doctor I requested from my insurance Co because the one I had was taking me off of really important meds without discussing with me the reasons why, caused me to lose my pulmonologist because she wouldn't order the test he desperately needed to determine how to treat me, and would NOTeven acknowledge I am borderline diabetic. So my insurance Co's customer srevice agent's recommendation of Dr ------, was a WONDERFUL choice! And the ultimate irony? He shared clinic space with my former and dearly missed neurologist! We had kind of a laugh together last summer when I mentioned how I'd lost my neurologist recently. My PC chuckled and said, "Are you saying ------- has finally, REALLY retired?!?!?!?" I responded, "Nope. He just doesn't want to deal with we old farts anymore, and pursue his passion, rug rats, instead." My PC rolled his eyes and shook his head. "Let's see how long that lasts THIS time!" he said. I knew my neurologist was technically retired when I was seeing him and I'd learned from another patient, my neurologist's idea of retirement was closing his private practice where he saw 30 or 40 patients a month, all to NOT golf every day, or buy a villa in Italy, but go to work for the University Hospital Neuroscience Center where he saw 250 patients a month!
And yesterday when I was talking to an insurance agent, she said she'd run across so many "providers" recently who, since 2020, are retiring early, moving back home to be with parents, or are just leaving to do something else. I got to thinking, I wonder if that's what my neurologist did? I remember he was so PO'd when I told him last year the Neuroscience Center wasn't allowing any patients to schedule follow up appointments because of the COVID19 "Crisis Program" the NM Governor had locked all the hospitals down with (which she has done again), determining "neurology" was not an "essential" department. He may have started thinking he would have to get out of the hospital environment where he daily saw patients, and move to a "consultant" role, where he could still do what he loved doing, but would just go from hospital to hospital to "consult" on pediatric cases, instead of being told he wouldn't be allowed to see his patients. :::shrug:::
Anyhow. . . A couple of weeks ago, I met a gentleman who was at the community center to talk to Medicare customers about a brand new healthcare system that has just moved into my city. It sounded fantastic! ALWAYS seeing a doctor for a full 40 minutes, doctor LISTENING to a patient rather than messing with a computer (a nurse will also be in the exam room typing on that computer instead of the doctor). It is designed so patients will feel more engaged in their own health care, instead of just being another number in the waiting room being called back for 10 to 15 minutes.
Everything he was telling me sounded fantastic, except . . .
I would have to give up my primary care Dr and go with their's.
I told him I loved the idea, but I just didn't want to lose my primary care.
omgoodness.. that healthcare system sounds MAGICAL! and what nutjob decided NEUROLOGY was somehow non-essential? how are patients to get infusions and other essential services except to be seen in a neurologists office or an infusion center? I know when i was receiving the Tysabri infusions i was getting them at my neuro's office. So i would get the infusion on the same day i saw my doctor... I have been doing telehealth since this crazy pandemic thing started but i still see my doc.. i am no longer on Tysabri or i would need to be going into the office every month.. that would drive me up-[ the wall.. Its bad enough when i have to g in for MRI's and someone is sniffling and coughing on the other side of the room.. yet there is a big sign on the front door that says if you have a cough or any other COVID symptoms DO NOT ENTER this building.. call from outside or go home and call and we will reschedule you.. UGH
It was just the insanity of 2020. A neurologist still needed to be on site because the University Hospital is a Level I Trauma Center. It just got to a point where it felt if you didn't arrive by ambulance or helicopter, you weren't getting in. Doctors, regardless of their specialties were told to forget their specialties, and their normal clinical locations. They were to work as support staff for the doctors and nurses tending COVID19 patients. Fortunately I wasn't on anything requiring a fusion., so I don't know how that was being handled. I just know former last face to face appointment with my neurologist, we were sent to the med school rather than the usual Neuroscience clinic because that was too close to the hospital. Things were finally starting to go back to normal when a couple of weeks ago, the Healthcare systems in my town went back into "Cisis" lock down. I feel so bad for people who have cancer, kidney disease, heart diseases. Those issues ain't COVID19, so treatments for health issues the US government doesn't extra get $$$$$s for, get labeled "nonessential" and treatments become "elective ", and they don't get those "elective" treatments.
While the media is doing what the government has told them to report on--every hospital bed is filled with "unvaccinated" COVID 19 patients--they are saying absolutely nothing about how cancer deaths have skyrocketed . . .
But the death will be claimed aCOVID 19 death so the state will get the money.
I know how horrible it is. On the flip side of this, I live in Florida where our Governor refuses to follow the science behind anything. He fired the one person who had a brain in the Depart of Health that refused to change the numbers in the late spring of last year so he could reopen the state early. May 4th 2020 he reopened the state and then gave a speech 3 weeks later about how everyone was talking about FL becoming the next epicenter and how he didnt believe it and if YOU did he had a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you.. A month after that, Florida WAS the Epicenter of the nation for number of cases and fast approaching # of daily deaths. What do you think he did? He reopened the bars and clubs and THEN told every county that no matter what restrictions your local government put in place to protect you, to ignore them. If you get ticketed or fined (some counties were fining businesses for capacity etc) then to contact him and HE "would make it go away"... And the upward trend continued while THOUSANDS of people got sick sick and died.. including children and young adults... Florida now has the rather dubious distinction of having the highest number of deaths in the entire nation, even ahead of NY now. My Governor is a Trump wannabe that believes this is all a big hoax and does not believe this is nearly as bad as they are making it out to be. He wants to be President and will likely run in 2024 if Trump does not. If you watch him give speeches, he has all the same mannerisms, and key catch words that Trump does, same hand gestures, same pauses and the like.. He makes me sick. When the Federal Government was offering to continue to bolster the Pandemic Unemployment Insurance for people that were sick and had to quarantine, this man said NO, he did not want the money. SO the people who get sick because of his lax policies get a whopping $275 a week max. Period, no matter how much you were making. He then turned around and whined because Florida did not get as much money from the American Rescue plan that Biden passed? really? OMG! this man is nuts. He was doing press conferences in parking lots of Publix grocery stores for the vaccine rollout announcements. Why? Because Publix is one of his BIGGEST super PAC donors and they got a huge chunk of the vaccines that had been slated to go to pharmacies and hospitals and county health departments. THEN, you could only sign up online for an appointment to get the vaccine twice a week, and sometimes would need to travel 2 hours or more one way to get to a store that could give you a shot because not ALL stores got the vaccines. Of course the richest counties got them first and the poorest, working class counties were among the last to get the vaccines. He meted the quotas out and refused to release the extra ones in stock because "Seniors First" and therefore only 65+ people could get the shots, while people like us could not get a shot until April 2021. BUT, he claimed Florida wasnt getting supply yet he was holding all the second doses back and the Federal Government would not send anything til he started to use those doses first.. It was a disaster.. I had to wait til April to get my first dose when he FINALLY said immuno-compromised people could get the shots and then he immediately made it harder by requiring a Department of Health form to be filled out by your doctor certifying that you were in fact compromised and in critical need of the vaccine.. only problem is he didnt tell anyone this and unless you happened to go to the Dept of Health website you wouldnt know this until you got the vaccination site to get the shot and they asked for the form... UGH! So yeah.. I agree that panic lockdowns are not called for, and I dont agree with them at all. I know someone who actually is dying now because her cancer surgery was put off last year as "elective" when it was stage 1 but is now stage 4 BECAUSE it was put off.. Somehow they need to stop doing that crap to cancer patients.. Cancer surgeries are NOT elective procedures.. IDK what idiot thought that one up.. But having a Governor that follows NONE of the science is worse than one that PANIC locksdown everything?:?? Not sure which is worst honestly.. They are both horrible because PEOPLE DIE!!!
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