Dis-appontments
My hospital is determined to confuse me.
During the week I got two letters. One was cancelling an appointment that I didn’t have anyway and the other was creating a new appointment next Monday.
I put hospital appointments in on my phone as handy reminders. Except that the hospital repeatedly sends me these letters cancelling stuff and creating new stuff.
Next week, for example I now have an appointment on Monday [at 8:15 AM] for a CT scan. And I have an appointment on Tuesday for a blood test [at 10:30 AM] and another on Wednesday [at 8:30 AM] for a dose of immunotherapy, both of which were confirmed by a letter a few weeks ago. So this begs the question – if I am in the hospital on Monday why not have my blood test then? They seem to like separating the blood test and the immunotherapy for some reason so a day extra couldn’t make much difference?
Please note also their delight in slamming the appointments into the middle of the morning rush hour? This isn’t out of badness incidentally, it’s to get me in nice and early so that I have a full day to wait for whatever it is I’m in for. They at least were honest about this in this week’s letter saying that CT scans were much in demand and that I mustn’t be surprised if others, for any reason whatsoever, may jump the queue and get in ahead of me. This presumably means that I can expect my scan somewhere around tea-time, or at least until the middle of the evening rush hour.
Or maybe I’ll get a letter tomorrow cancelling everything?
Thought for a moment that you were in the UK’s ‘envy of the world’ NHS, the appointment experience looking so similar. Then I realised that you do occasionally get some genuine treatment, so that puts you a step ahead – in the NHS by contrast, such appointments enter the ‘infinite improbability circle’, forever passing by but never actually achieving anything, beyond employing armies of administrator-drones to keep it slowly turning. Be thankful.
They do things to confuse you on purpose, i have just received a letter cancelling my appointment, followed by a letter giving me a new appointment which is exactly the same as the one they just cancelled. I will probably get fined for not turning up , they’re going to earn a fortune , so they can waste it on some new sofas for the manager’s office.