reference labs suck

I hate them. I hate radiology too. Thank goodness I at least have a phlebotomist at my new dr’s office (not the best phlebotomist but at least at today’s blood draw there was no blood trickling down my arm like last time–maybe they’re learning). A mediocre phlebotomist at a dr’s office is far superior to a great phlebotomist at the stupid Quest lab. I hate them!  I’ve spent way more of my day than I should trying to get a lab appointment to pick up a specimen container. According to quest, even that is either appointment or “walk in” aka. pick a number and wait to die!   There are no receptionists anymore at stupid Quest they’ve been replaced by shitty tablets in kiosks that don’t work well. If you try to do things the easy way and make an appointment online, it won’t show you the majority of appointment slots and it sucks and doesn’t work well. Using the even shittier phone appointment system is the actual way to get an actual appointment (this takes several tries usually and it’s really poorly designed but more appointments are available).  I hate them. I seem to remember LabCorp sucking too. It’s so tempting to see if I can have this transferred to a different lab.  My insurance covers several.  I have resigned to just attempting a walk in next week when I go to a radiology appointment.

The radiology appointment was also a pain in the ass to make. They couldn’t manage to get my insurance info. I finally got an appointment (which was. tomorrow at 9:30 and that would have been great), but the appointment confirmation said 7:50 am (so they didn’t schedule it for the right time either). So I had to go back through the phone tree, got a human, it was the wrong human (but she was polite, so that’s better than the first call), then she transferred me and I got it rescheduled. They kept trying to schedule it for a location 35 miles away. I finally got them to agree to reschedule it for the closer location and the scheduled time is not Monday afternoon (unless they scheduled this one wrong too, in which case, I’m canceling and finding somewhere else to get this done because fuck this noise).  This time they did enter the appointment time correctly, but didn’t connect it to the lab order and it’s not what the lab order says (I’m giving up and going to the damned appointment, it’s close enough to what I need, I think probably). They also entered my insurance information wrong again even though I repeated the info to the second scheduler 5 or 6 times.  I have homework to do. I had very little sleep. I had a dr’s appointment this morning that kinda threw off my day (partly because I’m having to waste time failing to get other appointments). I’m grouchy. Other appointment scheduling will have to wait because otherwise, I’m going to lose my shit. Richest country in the world, possibly the hardest and most expensive country to get healthcare.  Time for a coffee!