lady stuff and the current state of our healthcare system

So tell me, if you please, how someone is NOT supposed to use the Emergency Room as their Primary Care Provider if they cannot- despite hand selecting her PCP for his track record of being available to his patients and her OB-GYN practice being one of the best in the entire country- reach their doctor or receive treatment from her gynecologist?

Friday morning found me crying in the bathroom at work because it hurt when I peed. Fabulous. A UTI. Jesus' way of punishing a lady for daring to have sex.

"Lora, my child. You have previously gone forth and procreated. Why doth you attempt to smite me by having physical relations without the intentions of becoming with child? My Father who Art in Heaven, Hallowed be His Name. (His name is not "Hallowed" it is Yahweh. Don't call him "Hallowed". He has grown weary of that joke) gave you the gift of sexual pleasure so that you may only use it to give him the gift of populating the Earth that he gave you with minions of Christian Soldiers, marching unto war. You are failing miserably, you are a Pacifist and mother to only one child.  A child who hath never been to my church and whose precious head is completely dry of holy water as he hath not been Bathed in the Lord by a religious leader. Father is not pleased as that is an insult to the Heavenly Law and you shall thereforth be punished. I will drive one rusty nail pulled directly from the cross which bound me while I perished for sins such as thine up into your pee hole so you remember my word and keep it close to thy heart."

A call into the Gyn, who has treated me once before when I suffered at the hand of the Almighty. Two hours after that I call my family doctor, who is out of the office until Monday and his answering service is not accepting calls. Three hours later, a phone call from the GyNurse on duty telling me that I need to call my family doctor, that the Gyn doesn't routinely care for UTIs and I have to find another way to get a hold of the doctor if I can't get him on the phone.

Right, I'll send Pa with the horse and have him fetch the good doc and bring him to me.

Thanks. Sorry for thinking that a CrotchDoc would be interested in my urinary tract and bladder.

I have a friend who does GYN work, and I know he would call me in a script but that's abuse of friendship and medical licensure and the pharmaceutical process.

So I wait. And drink gallons of water and take those AZO pills and a handful of cranberry pills (thanks Samantha! It took the pain out of my bladder and ut, but I think I got them too late).

I wait for Monday and put my faith and energy into healing myself. I know that all it takes is a conversation with a doctor's office and they call something in. No questions asked. UTIs are common, and sister- let me tell you- you knows one if you gots one.

Around about 3 this morning I get some lower back pain. I have lots of lower back pain, so I write it off as poor sleeping posture and toss myself around. Four brought it worse. Five brought tears.

Five thirty on a Sunday morning is a great time to go to the ER. I was behind a head wound, but we were the only ones there. Pee in a cup (do you know how hard it is to pee in a cup when you have pain so bad that it's giving you diarrea? No? Really hard.)

I breezed through triage, and the doctor told me that microscopic infection inspection showed that it was beginning to turn over into a kidney infection so he wanted to give me a long dose of antibiotics (read: he wanted to make me better and give me a yeast infection at the same time) and he doesn't bother with "further testing for a woman my age".

Thanks, doc. You either age very well or I'm older than you, and I'm glad to hear it from your pretty mouth that I'm at an age where we just assume that X is wrong and we'll do Y about it. I'm glad that you said that about a UTI and not, like Cardiac Arrhythmia or Osteoporosis or something. I'm glad I'm old enough that I don't have to sit through an STD screening and the papers that you sent home with me told me to be sure to wipe from front to back and change my cotton underwear every day and pee after sex and use mild soaps rather than listening to you tell me that.

Advancing age has its perks.

So tell me. Why did it come down to me, someone who has the best insurance available, having to visit the ER before daybreak on a Sunday to get the treatment I needed on Friday morning for something as simple and common as a UTI?

I don't want to hear "and if you think that's bad, wait until Obama's healthcare plan kicks in" because that argument is irrelevant here.

I don't want to hear "at least you have health insurance and you were able to make it to the ER" because I work with people every day who don't have access to healthcare and I know how lucky I am.

Oh, and does anyone have trouble with those pain scales?

"On a scale from one to ten, how unbearable is your pain?"

"Well, I'm in the emergency room, so my pain is at emergency level. I've given birth, and the worst of that wasn't as bad as, say, getting hit with a Mack Truck so I said that drug-free active labor was a 2 or 3 because it was a "natural and expected pain" and the doctors laughed at me. I live with chronic pain, so I'm pretty good with handling things that hurt. I had a migraine for thirty years until recently and now that that is gone I've noticed my threshold is a little bit lower so I'm going to say that I guess... oh, I don't know. What was that girl with the bleeding head at? She was laughing and there's no way I can be laughing right now so I'll say I'm higher than Head Wound Hattie over there but lower than if you were cutting my leg off like a Civil War soldier. So what's that?"

"How about I put you at a 5 and you can discuss all this with the doctor?"

"Okay"