Why are there so many bad medical professionals in the world?

I use the term professional loosely. See cartoon below.

As most of you know, before I got pregnant with the twins, I was a relatively healthy person. I had some back pain, but it wasn't yet unbearable. I rarely got colds. I got the flu once a year and kind of looked at it like a tradition. It sweated all the toxins out of my body. I didn't get tired easily, and I ran around and did what I needed to do from day to day. I'd never had a surgery.

Getting pregnant with the twins changed everything, from day 1. I had horrible morning sickness, sometimes leaving me bedridden. I found an excellent OB, and I loved the staff he had in his office. Not having had to have dealt with many doctors before (only with my OB with Mitch, really, and he and his staff were pretty great, aside from the head nurse who was really pushy about breastfeeding), I didn't know what a great find I'd come across. Dr. Cox was brilliant. He remembered my name. He remembered I was having twins. He remembered my husband's name. His nurse remembered all of this, too. And when the day came for me to deliver, I showed up for my 6:30 a.m. ultrasound appointment, obviously in labor, and still sat through the ultrasound. The tech took me up to the office in a wheelchair and snagged Dr. Cox, who immediately came to my aid. He said, wheel her on to the hospital (the buildings were connected by a tunnel, how cool is that?) and by 10:45, Dr. Cox and his partner were cutting my babies out of me.

My babies were 7 pounds each at 35 weeks, so it was expected that carrying them would cause me pain. Having 14 pounds of baby in you hurts. Looking back, what happened to me during that pregnancy should have clued me in to what I think is wrong with me now, what's been wrong with me all along, what's caused my hip pain that I've had most of my life, my shoulder pain and my pelvic pain, my finger pain and even the pain in my feet and knees. All of these areas are where major joints are located. More on that later. What happened during my pregnancy is that the ligaments and bones became detached in my pelvis, causing extreme pain. Like nothing I've ever felt before. It was such bad pain that my doctor put me on Darvocet for the last six weeks or so of my pregnancy. He warned me not to take it very often or the babies could become addicted, as it was an opiate. So I took as little as possible, and he said with the amount of refills I had, I was doing fine.

Pretty much every woman who's had a baby in a hospital knows that the nurses in the recovery unit suck. I don't know if they get tired of new mothers whining about how much they hurt or what, but they're mean. And nasty. Up to that point in my life, the labor and delivery nurses in the recovery ward were the only really bad medical professionals I'd really met. I had some particularly nasty ones with the twins. One was too fat to wear scrubs, so she wore a scrub-like dress. waddled in and out and scolded me for not wanting to keep Hank in the room with me overnight (Harry was in the NICU for our entire stay, but he went home with us the same day we all went home). I told her she was rude and the reason I didn't want Hank in the room with me was because I had twins, and I was about to have to go home and take care of two newborns without too terribly much help, so I wanted to get my sleep in while I could. The next time I called her for pain meds, she took almost an hour getting to me. When I asked her why, she said, "Well, I was in the nursery taking care of YOUR baby," with an ugly sneer. Seriously? What a nasty human.

So I went home. With the pain meds they gave me. I found out shortly, that like most of the pain meds I'd been given in my life, they didn't do me much good. The way I have to take pain medication is save it up and take large quantities instead of taking small quantities over a lengthy period of time. So I don't have pain control for the entire period of time it's needed. I've explained this to countless medical professionals, and NONE has offered to help me. None has offered to help me figure out WHY this happens. None has offered to give me a stronger medication than Vicodin, or something without Tylenol so I'm not hurting my liver.

So I'm sick of it. I'm tired of it. I'd been planning to talk to my pain management specialist about it tomorrow. I see her once every three months, so I'd been planning on it for a couple of months. I figured this surgery was going to take me out and cause me a lot of pain and that I wouldn't be able to control the pain. But today, oh, today, and yesterday, two medical assistants made me contemplate assault and murder.

I'm not a snob. If you've gone through a few months or a year and become a medical assistant and have a certification instead of a degree, that's fine. You've done something good for yourself and are making better money for your family than if you'd been waiting tables. I have friends who do that kind of work and family, and they're sweet people.

These two women took it upon themselves to tell me they knew more about my medication than I did. I have no idea what's taught to a medical assistant when he or she goes through school, but I've been dealing with medication in my own life for about 20 years. For someone my age, that's a long time. I know they have no way of knowing that, but I told them. I told them I have a condition that causes chronic pain, therefore it takes more pain medication to ease my pain and nothing makes my pain go away completely, at least that I've found. The first one I talked to told me I was wrong. That if I took two Vicodin, it would completely get rid of my pain and if i took three it was just because I wanted to get high. I told her she was being ridiculous. That on my bad back days I took far more than that. I won't say how much because it's unwise to put that online. But there's obviously some condition my body has that doesn't process medication normally. It's not just me building up a tolerance, either. It's been like this from the first time I took a pain pill and it did nothing. Doctors have to give me quadruple or quintuple of the sedatives they use to sedate me. Anesthesia in normal doses doesn't work on me, and when I come out of it, I jump right up and put my clothes on and say, 'Let's go."

The point of al of this is that I called on Monday to ask my surgeon's office to refill my pain meds. They gave me 40 Vicodin. Before the surgery, I told the surgeon that I have an extremely high tolerance to medication and the pills don't do me much good in small doses. He said he wished he could do more but since I was already under pain management, he could only give me 40 pills and had to write the script to take 1-2 pills every 4-6 hours, but he wanted me to take two pills every four hours. I told him that was fine. He said if you're still in pain after they're out, call the office and ask what to do about a refill and also describe your pain to ensure that what kind of pain you're having is normal. Honestly, I'm used to surgeons being assholes, honestly, and he wasn't.

When I called the doc's office, I was trying to tell the medical assistant all of this and her words were, "Making up all of these stories won't get you more drugs." Seriously? I mean, no doctor has ever taken me seriously with this, but that's rude, and I'm pretty sure unethical. I mean, who says that to a patient who's just had surgery? So I said, look, I'm telling you, I took the meds like Dr. X said, and I'm following his instructions, and you're being really rude. Can you just talk to him, please? This was Monday morning. She said, he won't be in until tomorrow afternoon, so you'll have to wait.

Am I missing something here?

I've had my guts cut open. The gas hasn't gone away, and it's causing me a ton of pain. One of my incisions looks infected. I'm running a fever all the time. I'm exhausted, and I need time to heal. I'm one of those people who believes that if you're in extreme pain it delays healing.

After a beat, I said, "Look, I'm not making up any stories, all I"m asking you to do is to ask Dr. X if I can have a refill because that's what he told me to do. I'm thinking you fancy yourself a gatekeeper, but it's not your job to pick and choose who gets through to the doctor. It's your job to take the messages and get them to him, so do that, ok?"

She said, "Well, he's in surgery a lot, so I don't even know if I can get him." And then she hung up.

I was pretty pissed, but I had enough pills to last me through to the next day, so I let it go for that day.

The next day, I called again and got the receptionist on the phone. This was yesterday. The receptionist said, "Didn't you call yesterday a couple of times?  And they still haven't taken care of you? You poor thing! You sound just awful. You must feel awful.." Pretty sad when the receptionist has a better bedside manner than the medical "professionals".

She passed me on to Thing #1's cohort. Thing #2 was no better. I told her what had happened and she said,, "Why are you trying so hard to get more drugs? You shouldn't have gone through 40 pills so fast. These are the strongest strength and you can't take them that fast."

I then related my entire spiel about my tolerance to her. She said the same thing about making up stories to get more drugs. I was just in shock. I told her I had half a mind to report both of them to... someone. I don't know who you report medical professionals to. But I may find out. I told her she needed to find a solution fast, or I was about to get in my car and drive - something that wasn't safe for me right now because I was having stabbing gas pains, causing me to tense up and jerk my hands around - to their office and sitting outside the doctor's office until he showed up, at which point I would tell him what the two of them had said and done to me.

She said she would try to call the doctor while he was in surgery and ask him if they could give me a refill. I kid you not, she called back in less than five minutes, telling me that the doctor approved the refill and they' be calling it in immediately. She sounded really humbled and embarrassed. My guess is Dr X told her off when she called, and she wasn't expecting it.

Her mistake was assuming every patient is the same. You just can't do that. I'm not in the medical business, and even I know that. All humans are different. How hard is that to understand? This surgeon was exceptional. Most surgeons are assholes. If I have to have any other general surgery in the future, I really want to use him, but in my follow-up appointment next week, I want to make sure to let him know that his staff were really rude. Just the two of them. And I want to make sure to let him know his receptionist was amazing, although I think she was working for the entire practice, not just him. And she may be one of many, although I caught her on both days I called, so maybe she is the only one. I intend to find her and let her know how much I appreciate her kindness.