Hospitals suck

Last Friday I went to the eye doctor at my local hospital. I have to go there for my ophthalmology appointments because I'm diabetic, and for some reason diabetics are forced to visit "specialists" for everything. If I want to get a flu shot, I have to get it from one of the specialists at the hospital, because apparently the regular clinics just inject people with syringes full of urine. If I want to have a physical, I have to have it done by a specialist, because apparently specialists are better at grabbing my crotch and telling me to cough.

So instead of spending 20 minutes at Vision World, I got to spend two hours sitting in the ophthalmology department at the hospital. Hooray! I should have worn an eye patch to the appointment, just to make things more difficult.

Arrr! What do you mean "cover my right eye"? Would that be some sort of joke, matey? Don't make me raise the patch and show you me hollow socket!

But I'm a big sissy, so I went to the appointment sans eyepatch. I sat in the waiting room for 30 minutes, and followed that with a 30 minute wait in the examination room. Then a nurse came in and checked my vision with large rows of letters. After another five minutes of waiting, a different nurse came in and checked my vision with smaller rows of letters.

I'm not sure why two nurses were needed. Perhaps they've had problems with people bribing the first nurse so they won't have to get their pupils dilated to check for glaucoma. Perhaps the first nurse has bad vision herself, and is also unable to read the small letters. The second nurse, who I imagine has perfect 20/20 fighter pilot vision, probably just comes in for the "tougher rounds of eyecare".

You can feel free to use the phrase "tougher rounds of eyecare" at your leisure. You know you want to.

After the "tougher round of eyecare" (see how fun it is?), the second nurse put drops in my eyes to dilate my pupils (I only had 40 cents and a half-melted ice cream sandwich in my pockets, and she wouldn't accept them as a bribe). Then I sat around blind for 30 minutes, wincing from the light like a mole rat. Then the real doctor came. She walked in, shined a flashlight in my eyes a couple times (most likely to annoy me), and said "Eyes fine? Okay, good." Then she left. I'm obviously in the wrong profession. Why spend all day researching news stories and taking pictures when I can spend 15 seconds annoying patients with a bright flashlight?

Perhaps I shouldn't be so bitter towards the doctor. I guess I'm just annoyed because she probably gets paid ten times what I make. The examination room was proof of that. Instead of having a wall chart for patients to read lines of letters from, they had an Apple iMac computer with a $50 remote control to change between the different sizes of letters. That's the only thing they used the computer for. The computer costs at least $700, and they use it just for showing eye charts. But hey, kudos to them for saving the five cents it would have cost for a wall chart.

Hospitals shouldn't have all this money to waste. They should have bought wall charts and used the money they saved to hire another person to make appointments. Maybe then I wouldn't have been put on hold for 10 minutes when making my appointment. Or maybe they could have bought something to read in the waiting room that doesn't cater exclusively to housewives. Or maybe they could lower everyone's co-payment, since they're rich enough to drop $700 on an eye chart.

Just a thought.

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Reader Comments

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Paul Ryan      Oct 21, 2003 • 3:48pm   By the time I realized how bitter this column was, it was already midnight, so I was too lazy to make it funnier. Katers      Oct 21, 2003 • 1:21pm   Ahh, the waiting room at the optamologist - the story of my life. jen      Oct 21, 2003 • 12:06pm   we should have multiple scales to rate paul's columns: one for hilarity and one for bitterness.

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