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Fueled with proof that my mother's primary care physician had been
lying about some of my health issues, at least, I went to my
third appointment with the psychiatric nurse prepped and ready to
talk to her. But when I got there, she started off by apologizing to
me for not having called me to cancel the appointment. Still, she
lead me into her office and had me take a seat before closing her
door and explaining.
It turned out my insurance wasn't going to cover my appointments with
her as no doctor qualified in psychiatry or psychology had made the
determination that I suffered from a psychological eating disorder.
They didn't believe the primary care physician to be qualified to
make such a determination and the original psychologist who had seen
me in the hospital, while willing to not argue with the doctor's
determination, wasn't willing to affirm it either. Thus, without
insurance to cover my appointments to the psychiatric nurse, and
knowing I didn't have a job to cover the costs, she would make this
my last visit with her.
When I brought up that I had found something in my medical records
when I had received my copy, she wasn't interested and just wanted to
quickly get back to the topic of the previous week and why I had felt
apart from my peers. ''What do you mean?'' I asked. She believed
something had happened in my early teenaged years to make me feel
different and instead wanting to socialize with people who were older
than me, what was it? Crap.
Since the previous week I had debated if this was the time in my
life when I should bring up my strange puberty with someone and I
honestly couldn't think of a reason why this wouldn't be an
appropriate setting. Still, how
do you talk about something like that? I decided to start
off slowly, ''I think I was supposed to be a girl...''
''Is that why you got your ears pierced?'' she asked before I could
continue.
''Wha-- No. I got them pierced because I wanted to,'' I
returned.
She glanced to the clock on the wall and returned, ''You know, you
probably can't even afford this appointment either. I won't charge
you for today.'' With that she stood and went to the door and opened
it for me.
I sat there dazed for a moment by the abrupt change, I had finally
decided to talk to someone about my 'situation' and I was now being
shown the door?
''I'll still have to charge you for the first two visits, but it'll
be at a discounted rate as we didn't know this would happen,'' she
said as she waited for me to leave.
I gathered my stuff, including the key sheets from my records that I
had brought with me and left as I was told.
I got home dejected.
What had been the point of all this? And what do I do now? I knew I
couldn't trust my mother's primary doctor based on the records I had,
but then what do I do? Search for a new doctor out of the phone
book; pick a name at random?
The following day I realized that, as I had gotten a copy of my
records from the hospital, perhaps I could get a copy from the
primary doctor's office just to see how much of his own records were
suspect. I called his receptionist and asked about it. She
confirmed that there was no charge for the first copy and I asked to
have one. When I went to pick it up a few days later, I thanked her
for it and then went back to my car and rather than leave the parking
lot to go home, I opened the envelope right there in the drivers'
seat and started going through the file. Sure enough, where his own
copies of the dietary survey should have been, instead there was only
his narrative about what he felt the results should have been, the
subnormal calorie intake, the barely adequate protein intake, etc.
None of the hospital records about my stay were included in this
file, again just his narrative report about how I had unknowing
had three days of corn syrup mixed into my food without ill effect
and how I gained weight while on the hospital monitored diet.
Yet he had no lab results or copies of the weight chart in the file
to back up his narratives. I realized that as I wrote stories about
fictional characters, he was using my file to write fictional stories
about me. Why?
Another thing that caught my eye on his visit notes was with each
time I saw him about my weight loss, there was the weight as measured
by his staff, but then next to it was my height. Time and again my
height was whittled down a quarter of an inch in his records until,
by my last visit with him, I was a couple inches shorter than when he
had first started seeing me years earlier. As his staff hadn't been
measuring my height with each visit, was the doctor himself doing
this as a means of comforting himself that my weight loss wasn't as
significant when compared to my ever shrinking height?
He did retain a blood test report from years earlier that caught my
eye. It was a comprehensive one where many items had been checked.
All were within normal ranges but what caught my eye was that it
showed the normal ranges for both men and women under each result.
While my numbers were to one side or the other of the normal ranges
for men, most all of them were dead center when compared to the
normal range numbers for women... What did that mean, if
anything? I spent another moment relooking through those pages
just to make sure I was reading them correctly and I felt sure I was.
Then I reached the end of the file and there was a report from the
psychiatric nurse, dated the same day as our last appointment.
Apparently she had used the time after having me leave early to write
up this report for the doctor and of the things noted were how I
called myself 'an oddball' which was the exact opposite of what
I had said, but also how I was suffering from 'a complete
psychotic break from reality'. Was I?
If anything, the objective hospital records and test results
conformed with my own experiences while it was the doctor's
narratives which bore little relation to reality.
When I got home, I called up the psychiatric nurse's answering
machine and told her that I had gotten a copy of her report and asked
if I could talk to her about it. To my surprise, she called back
before the end of the day and said we could and made an appointment
with me in two weeks as she would be away for a bit. But the day
before that appointment, she called me back to cancel. She told me
that she had been pressured to write the report by the primary doctor
and, upon reflection, had decided not to support it. When I asked
her about the 'a complete psychotic break from reality' line, she
said she had been asked by the primary doctor to put that into the
report to ''help me''. How could
that help me? I asked and she returned that the doctor
didn't think I could get disability benefits based on the medical
findings. Disability
benefits? Yes,
hadn't I filed for Social Security Disability? No.
There was a silent moment on her end of the line before she answered,
Well it really doesn't matter as she wasn't supporting the report
anyway. I asked if she could write me a letter stating that for
my records. She said she would and then told me that, if I wanted, I
could go to the community mental health clinic for follow-up visits
as they had a sliding scale for low income people. I thanked her for
calling me back and for the letter to come.
No such letter ever came.
After another week of considering my predicament, no health, no job,
no doctor I could trust, I decided to look into signing-up for Social
Security Disability. When they asked which doctors they could
contact for my medical records, I told them I already had a copy and
provided them the test results, the hospital records, everything I
had collected except for the doctor narratives and the psychiatric
nurse report. If I was going to be qualified for Social Security
Disability payments, I wanted it to be based on the facts...
Not on the primary doctor's fantasies.
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