Doctors, Doctors

Jared and I went to go see his doctor the other day. This is the doctor that he has seen off and on for many years. I have also seen him off and on as well, and he makes a fairly decent MD when we HAVE to see one.

For his TPN, Jared needed to have an MD primary care provider that the hospital could transfer administration of the TPN to. Jared chose this doctor because he is the only MD that Jared has seen that is local, still in practice and not a specialist. Needless to say, we are looking for someone else at this point.

The appointment was doomed from the beginning. There was a nurse there that must have been just hired because she was acting awful nervous. This was the interaction with her:

"I'm going to take your temperature." *Beep* *Beep* "It's 102! Oh.... Waits... That says 100.2." She looked very surprised, like that it was not possible that someone could have a temperature above 98.6. It was like she had read about elevated temperature in a medical book somewhere and now she is seeing it for REAL!

"I'm going to take your pulse. It's 100!" *Looks to me for confirmation that this too was impossible*

I say, "That's pretty normal for him, yeah."

She takes it again. "Wow, your pulse is 100!!" She was truly baffled again that this was even possible.

"I'm going to take your blood pressure." After taking the reading and telling Jared the number she walked over to the chart and exclaimed, "Your blood pressure is up!" (It was 114/78, well within normal limits.)

Jared shrugged it off, and as she kept pressing the issue, he said, what is the date of the last reading.

"2005." It didn't register that the blood pressure could have gone up since then. She still continued on about how elevated it was.

She then went on to ask Jared if he had any symptoms, and read off the list. She asked if he had a fever. He exclaimed, "YES I guess I do, you just read it and told me I do." She looked at him blankly and then shook her head like she was SURE that the reading she had taken was wrong (even though she took it twice).

*The Doctor Enters*

Though I can't talk about everything that he said, here are some highlights.

• He first got into the politics of socialized health care and how selfish it was of American companies to put a cap on a "lifetime limit" cutting people off after several million were spent. He touted how wonderful Europe was for not doing that.
• He told me that I needed to eat well to build mussel quickly not fat.
• He followed me around (I had Daphne) telling me to keep her away from this or keep her away from that and included all the possible bad things that could happen to her. My personal favorite was when she grabbed a pen to look at, he grabbed it back from her and said, "Her eye, her eye."
• He argued with Jared and insisted that he had been eating pizza, nothing but pizza, and that he would get better if he would just give up his pizza. "No wonder you are so sick, you haven't given up pizza huh?"
• He insisted that Jared's only problem was wheat allergy even though we told him over and over again that Jared was off wheat and dairy for months with no improvement.
• He told me that there was NO single case of Colitis or Crohns in Japan because they eat rice. This is in fact not true, and is something I have heavily researched myself, but he was SURE of the fact.
• When we tried to talk to him about his role in administering the TPN, he asked, "What's that?"
• When we went deeper into the TPN stuff, he asked if they could put fish oil in it. This is my personal favorite. He actually recommended that they put fish oil into a formula that was going directly into Jared's veins. This would kill him--it would kill anyone, and this doctor was hot and heavy on recommending it.

Needless to say, the doctor was incredibly rude and incompetent on Jared's disease. He had clearly not read the chart on what Jared was doing and his responsibility in it, and he was not thinking clearly about a treatment plan that would work. He also had the most green nurse I had ever seen.

We are looking for someone new at this point who knows what they are doing and won't spend over an hour creating the above experience.