Apparently I have been unknowingly lying to my children...

Lie #8017: You don't get your way from crying.

Unless you are a distressed mother trying to make a doctor's appointment.

My ruptured appendix kid had a follow-up appointment yesterday. Now, first, let me give you the back story on our doctor. We have a great doctor who for some reason works at a crappy family practice. CWFM, you suck! You suck because:

1. It takes an act of God to get an appointment with my doctor. When I call, you say, "He's busy for next week. We only make appointments a week ahead, so call back next Monday." But when I call on Monday at 8:05 AM, he's are already full, so clearly someone can make an appointment more than a week ahead. Several hundred someones, in fact.

2. You keep (oops!) switching my primary physician, so I have to beg my way back onto his caseload. And sometimes you say I can't see my doctor because he's not the primary doctor assigned by my HMO, even though my HMO swears he is and his name is printed in bold black letters on my insurance card. And then I can't see him until you get your freaking act together, which is how medical issues needing routine treatment become medical emergencies.

3. You make me wait about three years on the phone and entire decades in the waiting room.

4. When my son was in the hospital fighting for his life, the nurses called you and yet my doctor didn't know anything about it because apparently no one passed on that unimportant little tidbit of information.

5. Your nurse practitioner is incapable of diagnosing pink eye and eczema. She won't even entertain the possibility because I am just a hysterical mom who doesn't know anything. So my kids have to wait another week until we can see someone else and get the diagnosis and treatment I came in for in the first place.. A week is long time to have your newborn's eyes oozing and crusted shut.

These are only the top five... Blogger does not have enough bandwidth to store all of my complaints after just a year of seeing this doctor. We only rarely need to see the doctor, so it's not as big of an issue as it sounds, but I think we can all agree that MY DOCTOR"S OFFICE SUCKS. Anyway:

We waited for 45 minutes while the waiting room emptied and refilled three times. I had the recovering 12 year old plus my 5yo, 3yo, and 9 mo. They were starting to get wild, and then miraculously we were called back.

The nurse didn't know which boy was the patient. Hello? Read your chart?

Then, she starts asking me about Tyler's pneumonia. "What pneumonia?" I ask. She says, "Isn't that why he was hospitalized?" Umm, no. So we clear up why he's there. Meanwhile, the baby is working up to a wail and the two others are dissecting the examination room.

They don't have his medical history despite the fact that I filled it out less than an hour before, so I have to fill out another.

Then the doctor comes in. Not MY doctor. Oh, no no no. My doctor is so busy not even the nurses at the hospital can swing an appointment. We're seeing a very sweet little boy who looks just like my little brother Evan. Which is odd because our real doctor looks just like my brother Alex. But I digress.

The doctor has to leave several times throughout the appointment to fetch medical records that for some reason are not in the chart. He tells me that the antibiotic my son is taking is not the one indicated for a ruptured appendix, and he's all "no biggie" about it. The baby is screaming because she wants to crawl around and find nasty things to put in her mouth. My five year old is egging on my three year old, who I have to keeping pulling off her and putting back in his seat. It's chaos.

When the appointment is over, I go to make the next appointment. "Dr. C. is busy that day," the scheduling girl says.

"Why do we have to see Dr. C.? Why can't we see Dr. D.?" A rhetorical question, because our doctor is always too busy to see his patients (ironic) so we usually see someone else.

"Because Dr. C. is your family doctor."

Please, not this again... "No, Dr. D. is our family doctor." As I tell her this, I am trying to separate my two fighting children. The baby is still screaming, and the 12yo is pale and leaning against the wall falling asleep because he is worn out.

"According to this, Dr. C. is your doctor."

I was trying so hard not to cry, because I hate when women use that to manipulate others. But I was very tired and VERY frustrated. So I started crying. And the lady decided she miraculously could switch us back (they have always insisted that it's not that simple) and that we could see Dr. D. for our follow-up visit on Friday (who last Thursday was supposedly booked for this entire week).

As I'm walking out to the car, Grace starts crying because she wants to go back in and get a drink from the drinking fountain. "You don't get your way for crying," I tell her.

Oh, wait, maybe you do.