ONE BIG SIGH OF RELIEF

For those of you who haven't already heard, we got to breathe one big sigh of relief around here on Thursday. I took Claire in to the doctor's office on Thursday after a few sleepless nights with her coughing. She was diagnosed with nothing more than a cold. I'm still not convinced as this nasty cough that she's had for over a week doesn't seem to be improving...last night was the worst night yet. Now watch. I'll eat my words (quite gladly, I might add) as she'll now sleep through the night and the cough will be gone in the next couple of days. But this cold/cough is not the reason for the sign of relief...

While we were at the office, I asked the doctor (not our usual...Thursdays are Dr. M's day off) to see if they had heard anything about Claire's x-rays from PCMC. He checked her chart and couldn't find anything so he had a nurse check. In a case of ZERO surprise, she found the results on the hospital's online system with our geneticist's name as the prescribing/referring physician (see below for my wining about that). I know you've probably assumed what we found out from the title of this post, but the news was:

The x-rays of Claire's hips and pelvis came up totally normal.

Ahhhhhhhhh. Breathe in, breathe out. There is still the question of why that foot is turned out. I asked the doctor we were seeing about this and he said that he'd be leaving that discussion for Dr. M to handle. I didn't get a call as expected on Friday so I'll be making one to the office on Monday. Here's hoping it's an easy fix for our little girl. Either way, it feels simply GREAT to have that first little weight lifted off our shoulders.

Now if you don't want to read my complaints about the hospital's records, stop here. However, if you want to be peeved with me, read on!

When I went and registered the kids at PCMC on Tuesday morning, the girl doing our data entry and such pulled the blood order from their files and I gave her the order for the x-ray from our pediatrician. I told her that they were two different physicians and that we needed to be sure that the x-ray results went to our pediatrician and that any information regarding the blood work got to our geneticist. She said, "We'll make it work". Side note: Her looks and behavior totally reminded me of Jennifer Lopez's semi-spacy assistant in The Wedding Planner (the actress is a bit cuter and doesn't wear glasses). On we go...as she typed away on her little computer, she asked me a couple of times to remind me of our geneticist's name and the spelling of the name of my ENT who referred us to him. I reminded her again that we really needed to keep the x-ray and blood work separate. "We'll make it work". Thanks for the reassurance, honey, but you've not asked me a single thing about my pediatrician and his information and I don't freaking believe you!

After registering, we headed to Radiology where the nurse who took us back kept calling my daughter "Clarie". I finally glanced at the chart and computer and saw that Miss Make It Work had misspelled my daughter's name (which was spelled correctly on the orders from both of our doctors). They finished up the x-rays and the nurse told me to go back to registration before leaving the hospital to get the error fixed. So on we went to the lab where I was informed that they couldn't proceed with the blood draw until the error was made. Back to registration I went. I took the lab "card" to the wedding planner and she laughed it off, made the correction, and got me a new card.

I didn't think of our registration issues again until our pediatrician's office showed that they hadn't received the x-ray results as they should have. As stated before, when the results were found, there was absolutely no mention of our pediatrician's name on the hospital's records. I still need to call our geneticist and let them know why they received information on an x-ray order that they knew nothing about. I'm curious to see what happens with the blood work...I'm thinking that chances are, in a number of weeks, Dr. M is going to get test results for some blood work that he had nothing to do with. Anyone else want to make bets?