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Kitchen Table Kibitzing: ER [1]

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Date: 2022-06-30

As I write this Wednesday morning, I am waiting to leave for a 9 am appointment at Urgent Care so a doctor can take a look at the swelling behind my left knee to determine if I need an ultrasound to rule out a deep vein thrombosis. This time around — I had a DVT five years ago — the affected area isn’t warm or red, the only swelling is the lump itself, which isn’t very big. There’s some pain in the knee when I walk. Kinda odd though that five years ago when I found some suspicious swelling etc. in my leg I had a cold as horrible as the one I’ve been battling since last Friday. (Body aches, cough, sniffles, enough so that I home tested, got a negative, then dragged myself out for a Covid test Saturday, which came back negative Monday am. So that’s good news.)

I spent yesterday trying to find an appointment with the UCSF vascular center and my primary care team at One Medical. Body still aching, my head is so congested it is swimming around in some la-la-land. Appointments are impossible. My own doctor is booked out 27 days. The triage team at the vascular center doesn’t think it is a blood clot so they ordered a test at Quest Diagnostics. Quest didn’t have any openings until tomorrow. The test supposedly measures something in your blood which rules out clots. If I go this route, the vascular center won’t get results before Friday which means I’ll probably be waiting for confirmation and treatment until next week.

I’m hoping that Urgent Care will send in a request to the outpatient imaging center at our local hospital for an ultrasound. What I don’t want to do is spend the day at the hospital, which right now is so overcrowded (Covid numbers are up in the county) that yesterday they were turning away ambulances.

Reporting back in Thursday noon. I ended up in the ER yesterday for four hours, waiting for a sonogram after the doctor at Urgent Care said she couldn’t send me to outpatient imaging because there would be no one at UC to follow up with results. You no longer have to be transported to get a sonogram. They come right to your bedside with a portable machine. Results came back negative: No clot. Because they are an emergency room, the nurse told me while handing me my discharge papers, they aren’t in the business of diagnosing what exactly is the cause of the lump. They directed me to see my primary care physician. The inability to book an appointment with him precipitated my ending up in the ER in the first place. The only appointment I can get with my doctor is a virtual one next week. I’m hoping they send him the images and I’m thinking I’ll be asking him for a referral to an orthopedist. That’ll put treatment a good month out.

What a messed up health care system. Everyone I talk to has stories about the long wait times to get in to see any doctor. My glaucoma specialist can’t see me until August and I booked that appointment two months ago. I’m wondering if this is mostly due to us baby boomers reaching the age where we are all experiencing concurrent system failures.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/6/30/2107261/-Kitchen-Table-Kibitzing-ER

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