Stupid health system.

[xooll]

So, last monday I fell off my bike and hurt my arms. Unable to bend my elbows, I called out from work on Wednesday to spend 5 hours waiting at the emergency room of Northern Dutchess hospital and eventually was told it was just bruising. Next day, I'm told they saw some swelling that could indicate a fracture, so I should follow up with an orthopaedist if it still hurt in a couple days. It did, so I started to try to find an orthopaedist. I called the hospital and a rather rude individual told me there weren't any around right then and gave me a phone number to call in the morning. During my break at work the next day, I tried to call that number but found that I had lost it. So I called the hospital again and got another, different number, which turned out not to be a real number at all. Then I got home that day, found where I'd written the first number, tried that, and after boring through 3 layers of being on hold, I got in touch with an orthopaedist's office (all the way down in Poughkeepsie, for some reason) and was all set for an appointment the next day, when they told me their office didn't cooperate with my insurance (for some reason). So, unable to pay $200 out of pocket, I gave up on them. Then I tried calling my insurance company and they gave me the number of a couple of orthopaedists in Catskill (This was by far the simplest and most helpful interaction of the whole experience). So today (10 days after the accident) I called the first of those numbers to make an appointment, and after 10 minutes on hold, they for some reason insisted on making my appointment be that day at 1:10 (during work hours). I asked if I could get a later appointment, but the only way to do this was to try calling again later in the day to see if somebody had scheduled their own appointment for 1:10 that I could get in after. There was no option for making an appointment that wasn't the very next available time slot. I called 3 times during work that day, and each time the available appointment slot got a little later, but still during my work. When I called at 3, after work, I asked if I could get an appointment for after 3:45, and they told me that the doctors don't see anyone after 3 PM. I wish they'd told me that at 9:30 AM when I asked the first time. But the person I spoke to cut me a break and apparently got the doctor to agree to see me at 3:30. I drove up from Kingston to Catskill as fast as I could, not really knowing exactly where I was going. I managed to arrive at the office at 3:45, to find it closed, locked, at the end of a darkened hallway. They may have waited for me, but not long. I can't blame them, but it was frustrating. I went outside to return to my car when I remembered that the other orthopaedist the insurance person was somewhere on the same street--146 Jefferson Heights vs. 159 Jefferson Heights. So I took a walk. Soon I found the other place, and, desperate, walked in to make an appointment. They were, fortunately, still open. Unsurprisingly, they only had appointments available for tomorrow morning (work hours). But I bit the proverbial bullet and agreed on a 9:00 appointment. So, provided that things go smoothly and I can find the place (which is different, for some reason, than the place on Jefferson Heights that I walked into) tomorrow, I can finally get my arm looked at.
They may just tell me that it's not a fracture after all. They may tell me that it is a fracture, but since it's tiny enough not to show up on the ER's X-rays, I don't need a cast, I just need to not move it for a few weeks. Or, they may give me a cast. They may discover that, since I believed for a day that it was only bruising, I did something to the fracture and now it needs to be set, but because so much time passed between now and then, the bone has already started healing wrong and they need to do surgery to break it again and realign it. They may tell me to spill blood at the altar of Mith'rhakygh and chant incantations. I really don't know.