ChezPerky

I saw my perinatology practice last week.  Dr. P. had left for the day, so I saw Dr. M.  I like her, but sometimes she’s a bit wishy washy.  I told her about the difficulty I’ve been having with finding an obstetrician willing to take me on – and mentioned that several doctors have told me that my best bet is to simply see the perinatology group directly.  She didn’t really acknowledge that last part, and just gave me some more names of doctors to try.   (Meanwhile, I dropped my records off last Tuesday to a practice to review before deciding whether to take me on as a patient… it took them a week, but this Tuesday they called to confirm that they were declining to accept me as a patient)  I can call doctors until I’m blue in the face, but it’s clearly not getting me anywhere.  Sigh.

The rest of the appointment with her was good.  She prescribed IV Steroids to see if that helped the nausea.  It did, a little (though not a lot, but I’ll take it!), until I started trying to taper the steroid.  Sigh.  The baby looks great and is growing exactly on schedule.  And Dr. M. also called the home health company to order that the dressing on my PICC line be changed stat – the tegaderm needed to come off, because my skin was so raw and painful and ick, that it posed too great a risk for infection.  Plus, hello?  It HURT!

The home health company couldn’t come out that night  to change it, plus we were expecting a big snow storm that night/the next day (we got 20 inches!).  Also the home health co. didn’t like the idea of just wrapping the PICC line in gauze – but there weren’t a lot of options because tegaderm clearly does not agree with my skin at this point.  I ended up having to go to the emergency room to have the dressing changed.  By Monday, when my nurse came to change the dressing again, the difference was astounding – it no longer hurt, the skin was healing, it was perfect.  But… the home health care company was still not going for it.  Their protocol is that if there’s gauze on the site, the dressing has to be changed every 48 hours (though my primary nurse admitted that no one has shown her this policy written anywhere – it seems to be a rumour floating around).  So they sent a new dressing out to me to try that.  And?  It’s just a different kind of tegaderm.  I’m already hurting and itching, and it was just put on yesterday.

I do have some possibly-good news, though.  Since I can’t seem to find a doctor who delivers at the hospital five minutes from my house (where I delivered my triplets), I called the birth advisor at another hospital that isn’t quite convenient, but it’s not so bad as long as we don’t have three babies in the NICU this time around.  She got me an appointment with one of the other practices that several friends had suggested.  They had previously expressed that they wouldn’t see me, but I was talking to a receptionist and the birth advisor was speaking with a clinician.  So I have that appointment on Tuesday – I don’t know if they’ll take me on directly, but at least he’s willing to talk to me directly instead of just reviewing my records.

If that fails, I’m seeing Dr. P. on Wednesday – and I’ll talk with him directly.  If he won’t take me on as a direct patient, I’ll head down to the big OB/GYN practice at a nearby University hospital – they are excellent and will take me as their practice is made up of both regular OBs and MFMs – but I was trying to avoid that.  It would mean going into the city for every appointment and delivering at a not-so-local hospital.  Having a hospital 5 minutes from home makes me really begrudge the 30 minutes (without traffic) that it would take to get downtown.  I work just four blocks from the physician’s office building, but I’ve been working a lot from home, and I only expect that to increase, so it won’t be convenient forever.

Hopefully, I won’t have to go that route.

It would be lovely to have a doctor at some point, wouldn’t it?