The state of health care in the United States today is totally frightening. I know this because the radiology doctor in charge of Terry’s ultrasound told me I should be frightened. Apparently there will be no more medical care available after 2017.
There are some days when the complete obliteration of medicine would be okay with me. I’m a little nervous about being a good dad, and I’m not doing as well as I think I should with my business, and there’s lots to do for the baby, so I’m depressed. Not lay-on-the-train-tracks depressed, but a little depressed. So I asked my primary care physician if it was normal for expectant fathers to be depressed. She looked at me as if I had just told her I was planning to kill the baby the second it left the womb. “Oh no, that’s not normal. Most fathers don’t get depressed, the mothers do. I think we should wait a month and see if it goes away. If not I’ll give you drugs.” In case you’re not familiar with depression, that’s about the worst way to handle it. In a few sentences, she told me: 1.) You’re abnormal, 2.) Suffer for a month, 3.) I don’t need to evaluate you or recommend counseling; I’ll just give you drugs. Needless to say I’m looking for a new PCP. I seem to be always looking for doctors these days.
Lately our whole life is about doctors. Terry has needed the services of several specialists during the pregnancy. All determined that she is doing fine; whatever the issue was, it ended up not being a big deal. We have been talking to pediatricians since once the baby comes out, the OB is concerned with just Terry and the pediatrician takes over for Ronan. Apparently pediatricians charge you for meeting with them beforehand, so we’re skipping that part and going right to the post-partum meeting. This is apparently kinda weird, according to the pediatrician’s nurse. I wondered while I was on the phone with her if maybe the pediatrician was interviewing us as much as we were interviewing them. Maybe, like ministers, there are pediatrician parties where the gather and diss their crazy parents and share their names so that they can pretend to be too busy when they call.
We did have an in, supposedly, in that our selected pediatrician treats the children of a close friend. I’m not sure what this does for us if the close friend is one of the crazy ones, but I’ve met her and I’d be extremely shocked if she was a nervous parent. Hopefully her good name will get us some recognition during the first visit in the maternity ward.
Later the same day as the appointment with the really terrible PCP Terry had an OB/GYN appointment. Everything is normal, as it has been since the pregnancy started. We know this because the nurse came in and said, “Your urine is good,” and left.
Terry looked at me.
I looked at Terry.
Then we both burst into laughter. “How does she know? Did she drink it?” When the OB came in, I said, “The nurse says urine is good.” Laughing, the OB responded, “We drink the blood, but not the urine.” Terry’s OB has a good sense of humor. That, and the approximately 1,000,000 babies the OB has delivered (all of them are posted on every vertical surface of her office) make her a good OB.
Too bad there’s not a “sense of humor” indication in doctor finders. Sometimes a sense of humor, and the ability to listen to patients without making them feel abnormal, is just as important as a degree from a well-known college.