Sometimes I Really Hate Doctors

Not hate, really. But they piss me off.

We have been a bit under the weather lately, playing musical colds and bronchitises since, like, November, and things kicked up a notch for the girls and Lone Star Pa in time for school to start again. As a result, we have been playing the is-she-too-sick-to-go-to-school-tomorrow-or is-she-okay-so-we-can-go-to-work game around here a bit, although things seem to have settled down now, if the Lone Star Baby would just start eating reasonable amounts of real food again before all this milk-subsistance she has been doing wears me clean out. I expect it is often difficult for parents in any work/life situation to deal with doctors, but I have found the working mother-doctor communication thing to be just impossible lately and I am so very frustrated.

It all started in the summer when the Lone Star Girl seemed quite ill for awhile. She was having some really nasty GI symptoms on an almost daily basis and was tired and anemic and sleeping a lot. I started torturing her with leafy greens and gave her iron supplements but I wanted to know what was going on, besides the obvious impending puberty, because she really felt crummy. Meanwhile, the doctors had tested the Lone Star Baby for everything under the sun due to her slow growth, and one test they seemed to pay special attention to was the blood test for celiac sprue, a serious intolerance to gluten found mostly in folks of Irish descent (ding) that can have really bad consequences, starting with the sort of symptoms my kids were having. The Lone Star Baby's tests came back normal, but I read that they were often falsely normal in kids under 5, so when she stayed small and my older daughter stayed miserable, I was concerned. The gold standard for diagnosis is an upper GI scope and I didn't want to do that without a super-good reason, but I wanted to find out. I got the blood test on my older daughter and myself, and our results were not normal. The test measured two antibodies and the ones that were supposed to be most accurate were not higher than normal, but the other set was higher than normal for me and dramatically higher than normal for the Lone Star Girl. I read that the first antibody, although more specific to celiac disease, often was not high in celiacs due to the fact that many celiacs are deficient in it and did not make it. One could tell if one was deficient in it and therefore should pay more attention to that second number by getting a total count of the first number.

I set out trying to get my daughter a total count of the first number ordered and entered a maze of bad phone message communication in which I would leave detailed messages and ask for specific info. to be left back on my message and then get messages like "I'm returning your call". It was very frustrating. The only thing I could tell for sure was that the doctors thought I was a total wack job to be worried about this, but, meanwhile, my kid felt worse and worse all summer long. One day, when my kids' regular doctor was on vacation, another extraordinarily rude pediatrician told me that the original blood work had already included a total IgA count and that it was normal. HELLO. I had been trying to get a total IgA count for a month and they had already done one, that was not on the lab work results they had given me, and it was normal and they never bothered to tell me throughout all of those questions and messages and all of that pleading?! Argh! I was enormously relieved, but angry.

This doctor, who was even more specific about what a wack job she thought I was, ordered a blood test for common food allergies, which I took the Lone Star Girl to get. A couple of days later, the doctor called me to say that the results were positive...for every single food on the test. She said allergies like that could definitely cause the sort of GI symptoms my daughter was having. She said they were mostly very low-level allergies but that the reactions for walnuts and shellfish were higher and that I should probably take her to an allergist. So. We went to an allergist. He did a skin test and said she did react slightly to most everything but not to walnuts at all (the Lone Star Girl now says she feels sort of like she can't breathe after she eats things with walnuts in them). He said these were not serious allergies and pooh-poohed my concern that food allergies have been known to get increasingly serious with repeated exposure. Of course, it is true that the Lone Star Girl could hardly avoid eating everything, so he said that she could eat whatever did not make her feel bad enough to want to stop eating it, essentially. We put the Lone Star Girl on some over-the-counter acid reflux medication, which handled the worst of her symptoms and that was pretty much that...except that she still has a lot of stomach complaints and I still worry about walnut flour, which is found in lots of things you would not expect it to be in. I do not really feel like she is totally okay, or like I have the information I need to really see to her needs, but I cannot find any doctor who seems to want to help, and I do not feel like there is anything acutely dangerous going on at this very moment so I am sort of at a standstill.

Trying to get info. on whether I should give the Lone Star Baby an antibiotic for her worsening bronchitis this week was a mess of phone tag that brought back those memories. It seems to me that far too many doctors have two main problems:

1.) They think no one else is as busy as they are.
2.) They think mothers are silly and do not need to be listened to.

I think they need to get a clue. I'm rather sick of the anti-mother sentiment that I think drives this lack of respect.