Adventures in Family Practice

So I have been an employee of the Joliet Doctors Clinic for exactly one week! Things are off to a slow but awesome start. I am building my own roster of patients which takes time. There are 5 other providers in this practice and some of them have offered to send a patient or two my way. But for the most part, everyone has their own patients and we don't really share, unless one of us is out of town/on vacation.

My office decided to advertise me this past weekend with a HUGE picture of my face in the Sunday paper. Hopefully, this will start bringing in the patients :)

My first day at the office I only saw ONE single patient. I had been waiting all morning constantly refreshing my computer screen hoping to see someone...anyone show up on my schedule. Finally, around two o'clock in the afternoon, a name popped up! I was thrilled, and then my joy was overcome with panic. Holy crap, I have to take care of this person all by myself! I quickly checked the "problem" column to see what they were here for and all it said was "sick". Okay, this could be a million different things. So I looked through the patient's chart to get a better picture of her history and then it was GO time.


The docs joked "...someone should take a picture, Amelia is seeing her first patient!" Ha! Thanks alot! I opened the door to find an agitated middle aged woman sitting on the exam table. I don't know why she was so irritated, she hadn't waited more than 30 seconds for me to enter the room. I introduced myself, took a nice little history, did my assessment, and poof....acute sinusitis (sinus infection). Easy peasy I thought! I'll just prescribe an antibiotic and that's it!

No...that was not it. This patient had not been into the office for quite a long while and she suddenly sprung a laundry list of problems on me! Back pain, weight gain, tingling in her fingers, swelling in her right leg....ahhh, the list went on and on!!! I wanted to say, listen lady, this is a 15 minute appointment, but clearly that would be rude.

Technically, in this sort of situation, you are supposed to tell that patient that they will need to schedule a routine visit in order to allow enough time to manage the other issues. I knew I didn't have any other patients so I decided, what the heck, I'll see what I can do. I went through all of her complaints one by one. It took a good 45 minutes. Finally, I finished, I presented the woman with all of her prescriptions. She gave me an evil look. What did I do wrong, why is she not happy?!?!? She said, you didn't give me a prescription for _________ medication. I said, yes, I know, it is over the counter, you don't need a prescription. The woman threw a fit! Well my other doctor always gives me a prescription, she said! I explained that she didn't need one, that anyone could go to the pharmacy and get what she was looking for. This did not make the situation any better.

The patient started yelling at me, saying that I didn't know what I was doing! Not wanting to get in a full on fist fight with this woman over something so ridiculous, I wrote the name of the medication on a prescription pad to make it "look" very official. She left without saying thank you.

I returned to my office to finish my note and my medical assistant came in to tell me that the patient I had just seen was giving her a hard time. The MA had offered to fax the prescriptions directly to the pharmacy and the patient accused her of thinking she was irresponsible or assuming that she would sell the prescriptions on the street!!!! Wow! The poor girl was just trying to be nice! Fifteen minutes later I got a call from the pharmacy saying there was a disgruntled woman here trying to "fill" an over the counter medication. The pharmacist explained to my patient that the medication was on the shelf, and easily accessible, there was nothing for him to "fill" (exactly like I had told her). Apparently, she didn't get it.

I felt really bad about not being able to please this patient. I'm guessing this lady will probably never come back and see me, but then again, I think I'm okay with that. So that was it, I survived my first day!