Charlottekay
Here's my story. I went to work at Regional Medical Center in 2004. This is when I first learned about Gastric By-pass surgery. At this time I was in fairly good health on very few medicines. In 2005, I started gaining weight at an alarming rate. This was something I did not need to do because I was already over weight at 274. I was having a lot of breathing problems. I was have heart pains. I was tired all the time. I did not understand why. I had not changed my eating habits, my routine, or anything. I was starting to get scared. After gaining 50lbs plus I decided to go see my family physician. He found out that my thyroid had quit working. So he started me on medicine. I kept gaining weight, but he had slowed it down. He ran a lot of other test on me. Everything checked out sugar was good, heart was good. My cholesterol was not good. He let me work on that for a while then eventually put me on medicine for that. Over the next year I went every 3 months to check in with him. It seems like everytime I seen him he put me on more medicine. Then I told him I wanted surgery. He fought me for a while and put me off. Then he started running more test. Sent me to a surgeon, who recommend the surgery for me. I finally said if you don't help me I'll do it my self. I went on-line and found a seminar at Vanderbilt Weight Loss Clinic in Nashville, TN. My husband and I went to an seminar in October 2006. After I found out everything I needed for the first visit. I came back home gathered up all of my medical information that I needed. Scheduled the psyh test. Called Vanderbuilt back to schedule an appointment they set me up for October 20th. I was surprised to get in so quick. I called explained that I needed a later appointment time because I would be driving 2 plus hours from where I was. I put my kids on the bus about 7:15am. Plus my husband was coming and he works third shift. No problem everything is set. I get a letter in the mail telling me everything I need to bring and the time and date of my apppointment. Here's the thing. I get there they tell me I missed my appointment. It was at 9:00am that morning and the nurse practioner has already gone home and there is no one there for me to see. They changed my appointment the day before and noone bothered to call and tell me. I was so mad. I had worked a 40 hour work week in 4 days to take the day off for this appointment. Drove 2 hours up and then 2 hours back, gas money. My husband was going on no sleep. I was so upset I cried all the way home and about an hour after I got home. They wanted me to reschedule then, but I was so upset I refused too. I told them I didn't know if I would even be back. The recetionist was awful. So after a month I cooled off and rescheduled with them. Forward to Dec. 8th. I go into the appointment and they tell me that he does not see new patients on this day. And they wanted to know who made my appointment. I felt my blood pressure shoot up. They said this time it was thier mistake and he would go ahead and see me. Ok, so I'm thinking now this is two stikes, I just don't know about this place. Over all the drama. He medically cleared me and all I needed was my EGD and insurance approval. Then I could see the surgeon. I just don't know if I've picked the right place. After that last visit I felt like I didn't really matter, the only thing that matters is if the insurance will give them money. Everytime I try to call I get a machine. I'm scared if all this is happening before I even have surgery, are they going to be there for me after I have surgery. I even e-mail the office manager about everything that happened. She said she was sorry, that wasn't something that would normally happen. And so on and so forth. But then it almost happened again the second visit. Oh, and here's a funny part. I even called the day before this time to reverify that I had the correct day and time and that nothing had been changed. So fast forward today. My insurance approved me on 1-8-2007. I had my EGD on 1-5-2007. I still need to attend two support meetings and get this paper signed(looking for info for Providence KY meetings). I still need to see the nutritionist, scheduled for Feb 16th. I faxed everything to Vanderbilt tonight. So now I do not know what is going on. I call and leave messages. I can't get any information that I need. So at this point I do not know what's next. Hopefully I can get a hold of a real person tomorrow and find out something. (1-9-2007)
