how you are in the world

This was not the most successful day ever, from a keeping-the-nice-lady-calm perspective. Having learned my lesson from my first ultrasound, I belatedly took the advice my friends gave me six weeks ago ("You are a tiny woman. You do not need to drink the entire litre of water they're telling you to drink. That's ridiculous.") and so I was at least not as uncomfortable this time.

Not so good was getting into the little room and having the woman who was supposed to do my ultrasound tell me that I was only seventeen weeks pregnant, and therefore it was too early to run an anatomy scan. Now, I have done the math on this several times, and had a number of different other people do the math, and come up with a different answer (and so had my doctor) but do you know, people? She was right. Except I had fucked it up somewhere along the way and thought this last Saturday marked eighteen weeks. Well, hell.

The good news is that the systems for determining how pregnant you are are so nonspecific that when she did the ultrasound, she said to ignore the math because based on the baby's measurements, my addled calculations were actually closer. She did, however, move our due date back into late July from early August. (Relax, Team Leo--barring something unexpected, the shrimpbaby is still one of yours.)

We then went upstairs to get the accompanying bloodwork done. While I waited at the counter, spook went out to put more money in the meter. The guy at the desk looked at my paperwork and said "We need the form for this. This isn't the right form. Go back downstairs and tell them you need the right form." I went. Downstairs, the very nice woman at the desk said "They always do this. Wait a sec, I'm gonna send you up with a note. They don't need a form for this. They need a form for the first part of this test, which they did six weeks ago." She wrote a note, including her phone number in case the guy had any questions, and the instruction "DO NOT send patient back down." Upstairs, the guy was all, "This isn't the right form." As calmly as I could, I said
"Well, the people on six say you don't need a form."
"We can't do anything without a form." He tried to hand it back to me. I didn't take it.
"Perhaps you could call the people on six and sort this out with them." I watched him think about refusing, then put in a perfunctory call. He hung up immediately.
"It's their answering machine. We're not associated with the radiology department. They're a different company. We need a form, we won't do anything without--"

I walked away on him. Not politely.

Went back downstairs. The nice lady, April, was just getting on the elevator as I got off.

"The guy up on eight says they won't do a damn thing without a form." I told her, and burst into tears.
"Oh, no. Okay. I'm going to fix this for you. You need to get that test done. Come with me."

She called my doctor's office, was transferred around a bit, explained the situation to them. Told me that my doctor's office was going to call upstairs to wrangle unpleasant guy. "I'll come with you." she said, and did.

When we got back up to the eighth floor, we ran into spook, who had been frantically searching for me for some minutes now. "What happened?" he asked. "I'll tell you later," I said, grimly wiping away tears. Stupid pregnancy hormones.

April went through the same routine with surly guy, who by now I think disliked me almost as much as I disliked him. Then she turned to me and said "If your doctor hasn't called in half an hour, you come down and see me, and I'll call them again."

We sat for twenty minutes and then determined that even if my doctor's office did call at this point, we were going to get towed waiting for my blood work, because we were flat out of change. spook went back downstairs to confer with April, who reassured him that in fact we could go to another lab, one where they were not assholes, so long as we went soon. As we were gathering up our stuff to leave, another woman in the waiting room asked if we'd been there a long time. I said no, but there was some paperwork mixup. She said "Yeah, I've been here before. These people are not nice."

In the lobby, spook called my doctor's office and told them our story again, asked if we could come in and get my blood drawn by the sweet nurse there instead. "Because here they were mean to my wife and made her cry." So we're going in tomorrow morning, and Daniel will tell me a funny story and reassure me that my terrible fear of needles is just an extreme response to very old programming that tells our bodies not to let other people stick things in us.

This is a thing I will remember in my work, when I have the opportunity to make something easier for someone. The guy at the desk could have said the very same thing to me without being an asshole about it, could have suggested that we call my doctor, or, y'know, offered me the phone so I could do it. And while my job does not involve facilitating important medical tests for people, I still think it matters how I do it.

Thanks, April.