I met my new doctor today. She seems like a nice woman, seems actually interested and or concerned with my well-being.  This is a stark contrast to the treatment I’ve gotten from my randomly assigned doctor over the last eight months. I stuck with him because I didn’t realize the process for changing doctors within Kaiser was so….easy.

I think I projected too much of my past experiences with tech support (being an IT guy) into my expectations.  When dealing with tech support at Cisco, Juniper, HP, Checkpoint, etc. you typically have to deal with whomever you get randomly assigned.  At a bare minimum you usually have to go through the motions answering their Level 1, 2, 3, etc questions before you get the poor sap to realize you know more than they do and they should just pass the ticket onto an engineer. So I was thinking I had to put up with what I got.

It took a while for me to realize that I don’t have to deal with it. This is not some contractual relationship between to organizations concerning the proper arrangement of binary data and electrons, this is my freakin’ health.

So I finally called and asked how to change doctors…and well…it’s as easy as logging into a website and picking a new doctor.  While I was reviewing the doctors that were on the “open” list I realized a significant number of them had names I couldn’t pronounce.  I’m not questioning their medical capabilities – I have no reason to believe they are anything other than qualified. What I did question however was my ability to effectively communicate my issues and concerns to them through the communication barrier.  I deal with it enough at work to know that when I am in the middle of a problem – I don’t need to be repeating myself or what I think they are saying.  Ten or so years ago I had an outage with a mission critical piece of hardware. The individual who answered the phone had a Pan-Asian accent and was very difficult to understand.  He told me his name was Nick. I wasn’t in the mood, I asked him what his real name was, he told me Nick. This happened a couple more times until I said something along the lines of “your name is not Nick, it’s Sanjay, or Sandeep, or something like that – WHAT IS YOUR NAME?!” He replied something that was 14 letters long and I would never have been able to pronounce it…hence…Nick.  Anyways I told him that I had a problem – it wasn’t his fault, I’m sure he was a perfectly competent engineer – but I needed someone who spoke english as a native language because I had a major outage, it was 3am and I need it fixed…he got Steve.

I don’t want that with my doctor – I don’t want Nick – I want Steve or Jane and I got Jane.

Hopefully the next few weeks will present me with a more positive outlook on the medical industry.  Regardless of how it turns out I at least know now that I can change my doctor again if need be =)