Getting assertive

I may avoid conflict like the purple plague, but when I engage I seem to have a knack for taking the right approach to get things resolved.

At my wife's follow-up appointment on Tuesday for this stubborn bout of pancreatitis, the doctor upped the ante on her medications for nausea and pain, and restricted her to clear liquids for another two days.  Well, the mornings mostly seemed to go a little better, but there was no way she was ingesting as much fluid as she needed to, as she was still experiencing nausea and vomiting, not to mention the pain.

So: when our doctor called back last night, he told Teri to call the office promptly at 8 a.m., and when she started to object that she wouldn't be able to get hold of him, insisted that he would be there in the office, that she should have the staff give him a message and he would call right back.

This morning Teri woke up about 6 with dry heaves, then came back to bed. I got up forty-five minutes later, sent my coworkers an e-mail and briefly messaged this great friend of mine, then got ready for the day. At 8, Teri started calling the doctor's office, but they don't take their phones off of night mode until 8:10. By the time she waited on hold, they told her he'd just gone in with a patient for a physical, and dumped her into his medical assistant's voicemail (for the third consecutive day).

I was fit to be tied. I waited about 20 minutes on the outside chance her message actually got through to him, stewing the whole time. Then I told her I was getting in the car and going to his office. I really didn't know for certain what I was going to do when I got there, just that I was going to make them deal with us face-to-face, where they couldn't get rid of us just by pushing a button.

I went to the desk, gave them my name and very calmly (outwardly, at least) asked what I needed to do to speak to the office manager. When they informed me that she was out of the office today, I asked what I needed to do to make sure that "Jim Derksen" got my wife's message. I wanted them to know this was our personal doctor; after all, we've been seeing him for twenty years. One of his staff looked up Teri's account and didn't see any indication that she'd managed to get through to him this morning. She went to his office, and after a couple minutes came back and told me there was a note on his keyboard. I am absolutely certain, based on the way she worded herself and how long she was gone, that there wasn't one until she wrote it and put it there.

Before I got back home, Teri called to tell me that she'd heard from the doctor, she was admitted, and they'd be calling back to tell us where in the hospital to report.

I'm fairly confident that, had I not gone to the office, we'd have been waiting until at least noon before we heard from them.