APPOINTMENTS & DISAPPOINTMENTS

I bet, since the beginning of the year, I’ve easily had over a hundred appointments – and I’ve never been late to one of them. I’m a punctual person; I take pride in the fact that my brain can work out a simple schedule starting from the end goal and working backwards (the appointment is for two-fifteen, the drive there takes half an hour, it takes so many minutes to dress, fix hair and makeup, so many minutes to shower. Conclusion: start getting ready at such and such a time. P.S. have clothes ready well in advance of that ). Simple. And any Simpleton can do it. But do they? Uh-uh. Now I’m not calling doctors Simpletons – and thank heavens they’re not, but with the smarts it takes to become a doctor doesn’t it seem logical that they could figure out how to be on time?! To paraphrase U.S. Anderson: the most perishable of all things is time. Dealing with death as well as life, as most doctors do, don’t you think they’d know that? – and time spent waiting in a crowded doctor’s office is not time well spent!
My daughter has been known to walk out if she has to wait more than half and hour past her appointment time (but then she isn’t hamstrung by having to have a prescription refilled). I, myself, have been tempted to do the same when a patient who shows up late is taken before me – me who is not only on time, but early! And the reasons I’m taken late besides that?: the doctor is on the other side of the waiting room having snapshots taken with a group of foreign patients, doctor is having a marital spat (one that’s audible clear out to the waiting room) over a credit card bill, doctor is busily showing vacation photos to the office personnel, doctor and staff are fifty minutes late returning from lunch! And then I’m asked why my blood pressure is up? I’ve sat in the examining room (forty minutes past my appointment time) and watched, while across the hall doctor is trying out a new hair style.
Come to think of it, in the last hundred appointments, involving many, many doctors, I’ve never been taken on time. Wait, that’s not true. I was taken on time once. It was for the removal of a cyst. Two weeks later, when the bump was still there, I found out I’d have to go back and have the procedure done over – so even though I was taken on time, that appointment was really a disappointment.
FACT OR FIB? – you be the judge.