Doctors!

It has been said many times over that the military should be happy with their FREE medical care and I agree I am happy that I don't pay for it in the sense that we don't lose money out of our paycheck for it. I do however think that we do pay for it, in many ways. Jonathan has been treated for pneumonia since the end of December and he has seen four different doctors, with four different ways to treat it, and four different times that I have had to explain what has happened. We are going on our fifth doctor this week because he still is hacking through the night and day. No fever but I know how this works, if the stuff in his lungs doesn't come up it will become infected again! We made the appointment last Monday and the soonest they could get him in was Friday but because we live in NE and they don't know how to drive in the snow the appt was canceled and now the earliest they can get him in is Thursday, which is leaving all the time in the world for the infection to set in. We are checking his temperature every few hours and I am listening all night for the coughing because I know that if the coughing stops that is really bad! The reason we can't get into the doc sooner is because they are classifying this as a follow up appt and when you call the service to make an appt they only have so many appt for same day, follow ups, well baby, and recurring appts. That means that when you call for an appt you tell them what is wrong and they classify it and tell you when that appt is open so they could have four well baby checks open today but I can't get one of those because I am not coming in for that. Do you see how irritating that is for the patients? So you tell me do we pay? I have contemplated many times should we pay the money to be able to see any doctor we want off base and I have to say if they screw with me at this appt then we will be forking over the money to pay to have my child taken care of properly. To make matters worse the doctor we get to see this time is the same doc we saw two years ago that decided they were going to treat him for acid reflux because he has been coughing for over a month and once he coughed stuff up. I argued with her and told her that I wanted a chest xray because he has had pneumonia before I wanted to be sure. She finally agreed to do the xray even though she didn't think it was anything but acid reflux, and it turned out she was wrong and if I hadn't insisted we would have been back that week or a few weeks later with a worse infection!