I'm not getting anything scheduled because...WHAT??

Oops, I was off by a day for the PET scan. It's Thusday, which is still tomorrow.

I did better reporting it than my medical facility did scheduling it. My medical facility shall remain unnamed because of this little problem.

When the doc called me with the biopsy results, he gave me a name and number to call to schedule a PET scan and a surgery. I was taking notes, but rather than review all my notes, I asked him if the person I was calling would have all the information and know what to schedule. He assured me she would.

I made the call. Voice Mail. Here's the great part in the voice mail, "it may be the next business day before we return your call". The doc is stressing the urgency and the schedulers might be too busy to talk to me. I had a separate issue I needed to discuss with the doc's nurse. I got her voice mail, too. It had the same "next business day" message in it.

On the "next business day", I called again and actually got the scheduler, who explained that they only do PET scans once a week and she didn't know what day that was and she would call me when she found out. I was still getting voice mail for the doc's nurse.

On the third day I called again and got voice mail. I called back and explained the problem to who I could get. They put me on hold forever while trying to get the scheduler on the phone. The phone flipped back into the cue to be answered by the original receptionist I had already talked to.

I called again, explained that my situation did appear to reach the actual definition of life and death and asked to talk to the person who talks to very angry patients. I got a supervisor.

Supervisor called back an hour later and explained that my scheduler didn't schedule PET scans, she only scheduled surgeries and she was waiting on the schedule for the PET scan. The person who schedules PET scans was my doc's nurse, who was on vacation. I asked this supervisor if she could give this information to the doctors, who seemed to need to know things like that.

The next day I got another call from the supervisor. They don't actually do PET scans, so they can't actually schedule them, but she had set something up with someone who actually did PET scans. That was set for Thursday. She would try to get my surgery set for the following Tuesday, because my doc was off Thursday and Friday.

Later that day I got a call from the original scheduler. Now that she had a schedule for the PET scan, she could schedule my surgery for Friday. I told her that my doc was off Thursday and Friday. She told me he was coming in anyway to do my surgery.

I know it's not going to be a good golfing day Friday, but having the doc come in on his day off? That just didn't sound good. She explained my check-in time, but didn't mention anything about the overnight stay, which was in my original notes from the doc. That's when I discovered this was an additional surgery that wasn't on the doc's original schedule of things to do.

I sure hope the docs are more competent than the support staff. I think I'll remind them that I've filled out every single allergy questionnaire with an allergy to sodium pentathol and a reaction of death. I have died on an operating table from a reaction to a possible overdose of sodium pentathol. The way details seem to get lost in this whole experience, I'd hate for them to miss that one.