Communication breakdown...

From today's diary:

8/24/10

1505

Tuesday

At the dental office with the boys.  Connor being seen; Scott beside me. 

During the day I’ve been ruminating.

I’ve been pissed off the past few days, at the office of Scott’s nurse practitioner.  This is the second month in a row where I’ve notified them that I needed a new prescription for Scott’s medications and kept notifying them as the supply dwindled; didn’t get a call back, don’t know if my messages are getting through, and finally have to call them on it and express my displeasure—also via message.  Though I don’t like having to be this way, it is appropriate for me to be this way.  It is appropriate to be angry when repeated calls and requests are met with silence.  My requests are reasonable, and they are not doing their part; and the consequence is that Scott will have his last medication tomorrow.  This means that there will probably be a bigger gap because oftentimes the pharmacy doesn’t have the medication in stock and we have to wait a couple days for them to get it.  We have an appointment with her on Friday, so I suppose my messages will be fresh in mind.  They’ll probably be being careful with me.  I’ve not said things before when things like this happen; I’ve given the benefit of the doubt.

Communication seems to be an issue today.  Calling dr. M’s office directly after having received nothing back from her schedulers, where I’ve usually had a live body to talk to in the past.  I’ve spoken either with them or left a message each day for the past 4 business days: from  “please let Dr. M know that I’ve not received the prescription yet; I’ve had a bad experience with the prescription not arriving” (both on machine and to live bodies) to:  “Please call me.  The prescription hasn’t arrived yet and I need to make arrangements to pick it up” to “I’m not receiving the response from you that I need and it’s going to cost me” to “What can I do so that I don’t have to go right up to the very end of my supply and then have to scramble to get some?  This is not working and has to change.”  Just the mechanics of calling has been difficult; her numbers stored in my cell, so scrolling through the screens to find her numbers to dial on our home phone since my cell doesn’t work well at our house, to listening through her nearly 3 minute long greeting and ears pricking up when she said something about a cell and wondering if that’s different from the other mobile # I have and checking my cell contact list and sure enough it is so then I hang up before her message has finished to dial that number, only I’m not sure if it’s the correct number because she’d already said it before I realized it might be a different number from what I have so I dial the one I wrote down and get lots of rings with no answer and so while that’s ringing I try to use my cell to call her office # back in hopes that it can be working its way through the message and back to where she gives her cell phone # again, and finally the ringing phone is interrupted by a recording that says the party is unavailable and my cell phone has no bars showing and so I dial her number on our land line again (office) and wait through her message to get her cell # which is a different number and in the process learn that the pager I’d tried dialing yesterday was no longer being used (which is just as well because the pager had never resulted in my getting a call back anyway when I tried it before, and I never knew for sure if I’d done it right or not because it does nothing after I press in my phone number—that is, acknowledges that my “numeric” message will be sent, and if I follow it with a #, which it didn’t instruct me to do--it didn’t instruct me to do anything--which is part of why I’m left wondering if I’ve done it wrong and no message at all has gotten through:  my “numeric page”.) and so that may explain why yesterday’s page wasn’t answered (or, it may mean I did it wrong, and I keep intending to ask Dr. M what is the right way to use it), and so I hang up again and call the cell phone and leave a stern message about this being really difficult, my voice trembling with emotion because I feel like crying, and I’m partly ashamed to be reduced to this kind of anger and in essence criticizing her communication system.  Then I call back her schedulers to inform them that they did not respond to a direct request, a reasonable request, which I am entitled to have responded to in a timely manner.

Jesus.