HUNG UP ON
I had an odd experience on Wednesday. I was still floating. First in the early morning Susie Factimed me from their little $20 a day apartment in Bastille. On the flight to Paris Susie had sat next to a very loud and talkative woman who spent three hours telling the man sitting next to her, whom she had just met, about her children and grandchildren and showing him their photographs. She was a very cheerful woman and asked Susie cheefully when they were landing in Paris how she had slept. “Not well,” Susie answered politely. Susie was tired.
Then my doctor called me to see how I was doing. My doctor never calls me at home. It was like an old fashioned horse and buggy visit. And we are hardly able to talk in his office since I think Medicare only allows him 15 minutes for a Wellness Visit. But there he was, friendly and with what seemed like good news. All I had to do was to get the urologist visit scheduled at which visit he would probably test my kidneys and check to see if I could empty my bladder and possibly give me a pill to shrink my prostate and I would be on my way chasing after Susie and Todd. I would see Dr. Baumgarten again tomorrow.
So I was flying high, thinking I was on my way. And then the urologists office called, a young woman who was setting up my appointment. She was a young woman about 25 I could tell because I have encountered the same young woman at Asheville Eye and Asheville Retina Associates and every doctor’s office I’ve been to, the same efficient young woman at a little cubicle just after you enter.
“I can give you an appointment on February 6,” she said. It took a second to register, that was a month away. Dr. Baumgarten had just assured me that it wasn’t rocket science, anyone at the office could diagnose me, just to pick the earliest time.
It had been a week to get the referral to Urological Associates and now it was going to take almost a month more for someone to tell me I was good to go.
“If a person was ill they could die in that time,” I said, I thought humorously.
She hung up.
I didn’t know quite what to do. She was obviously irritated with me or overworked and tired of being told that it was her fault that people couldn’t get an appointment. I didn’t feel like calling her back and apologizing. She was the one who hung up, after all, not even asking me to take it or leave it. I would have taken the appointment and asked to be on a waiting list to replace any no shows. I didn’t feel like waiting a month in any case. So I would ask Dr. Baumgarten tomorrow what he thought I should do. But I was no longer floating.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 