Frustrations of a Mother

I was surprised to get a call from Jason to pick him up early today since he was not feeling well. This is the second week in a row that he has been unable to attend basketball workouts due to dizziness, cough, and colds. I also had to pick him up a few weeks ago from school in the middle of the morning due to the same thing. Each time, he would take an over-the-counter cough/cold medicine and would show signs of improvement in a day or two. He does have a history of allergies and takes Zyrtec daily to keep it under control so I attribute some of it to that.

When I got the call, I decided to swing by the hospital to have him checked out at the adolescent clinic. Call me overanxious but I do not think it is normal for him to be sick this often. I am frustrated by my inability to make him better, and I want what every mother wants, a cure. So there I am, fully understanding that they may not be able to take him in because he has no scheduled appointment. Whatever it was that was ailing him was not kind enough to give us advance notice.

I was right, nothing was open so I ask for the next available appointment at a later date. The front desk clerk sees people like me all the time and it is almost the end of the day. Since he did not want to deal with it, he refers me to the emergency room which I promptly refuse to do. One, it was not an emergency, and secondly, he would probably be seen four hours later due to the fact that people like us were tying up precious resources for those who actually had an emergency.

I repeat my request for an appointment even though I know that by the time he gets seen, he will probably not have any of his symptoms anymore. Going back to the scheduler, for some reason, his computer was giving him an error message. I keep the smile pasted on my face even though I am starting to get impatient. He finally gets it to work only to find out that Jason was not inputted in the system correctly and we had to resubmit paperwork even though we had taken care of that a few months ago. He wants me to go take care of it in another building.

My frustration gets the better of me and I flat out refuse to do something to correct what was obviously a result of someone else dropping the ball. They made a mistake, they better fix it and give me my appointment. To make a long story short, I was eventually able to secure a time slot for Jason in a couple of days. He is going to have to miss basketball workouts on that day again, but I would rather have him do that. Better safe than sorry.