Month: August 2025

Holy Shit! What a pain in the ass!

So I’m changing doctors. This guy is recommended and far more local to me than the guy in San Diego. I hadn’t switched previously because, well anything to do with the Medical industrial complex is always a royal pain in the ass. I figured I’d spare myself the annoyance until I really needed to deal with it.

Welp, it’s that time.

I initiated the “Get to know you,” appointment. It’s next Wednesday.

The practice sent me an innocuous reminder text. Okay, at least it wasn’t the 3 text reminders, 2 phone calls, and 2 emails that the BMW dealer sent me about the car service I’d scheduled. 

Do people just not keep any appointments anymore?

I clicked on the little link and was taken to their patient portal on my iPad. (I’ll often use my iPad like this as a firewall keeping my phone and computer isolated. Because it’s a lot easier to deal with flushing and reloading the iPad than the other two in the event it’s a scam.)

Their link took me to a patient intake form. Okay, that was reasonable. I could fill out all the bullshit ahead of time instead of doing it on an annoying clipboard in a waiting room full of sick people, wondering what exactly I was being exposed to as however many of them tried to hack up one of their lungs. 

Things were humming along nicely until I got to a couple of screens that presented no exit. Their software vendor had neglected to consider the possibility that a patient would be using an iPad with one of Apple’s Magic Keyboards.

Rotating the iPad didn’t reveal the “NEXT” button because I’d already begun entering data in the landscape format the Magic Keyboard presented data in.

So screwed! I tried handing off the input to the computer, but their wondrous Indian programmers must’ve thought that wasn’t something anyone would do, so they’d locked that out. I couldn’t scroll further up because again, the wondrous Indian programmers never thought about accessibility and what might happen if they’d misread the screen size. If someone had accessibility turned on, with the text being larger, then the user would be locked into a frustrating situation as well.

I reinitiated the session on my computer from scratch. In the full web page I could access the “NEXT” button. Okay… Moving on.

On the full size display they presented a typical “left hand” menu. In fact it was a progress bar not a menu. So while it looked like you could go back to correct mistakes… Nope! You couldn’t. You could restart a section, losing all the data you’d entered but you couldn’t just step back a step.

For example, They asked about hospitalizations, then they asked about surgeries. I couldn’t see the surgeries section until I’d completed the hospitalization section. SO the form is incorrectly filled out because in both cases surgeries were performed in hospitalization settings under anesthesia.

Then I couldn’t go back to actually fix the issue by entering the hospitalization dates followed by the surgery types and dates.

Annoying!

Don’t even get me started on the upload of ID and insurance card. The insurance card had a “Cropping feature” that didn’t work correctly. And the Insurance section did not properly scan the insurance card nor did it allow me to fill in the missing data.

Sigh…

Shitty software really pisses me off. 

It’s a damn good thing I wasn’t doing a LIVE BP reading.

Then they wanted signatures. Which would have been easy on the iPad but I wasn’t filling out the forms on the iPad. 

The iPad and Mac have a nifty function that will allow you to use an Apple Pencil to sign forms displayed on a web page. You can tell the computer to access the iPad for a signature. However the glorious Indian programmers had once again disabled that function.

What they in their infinite wisdom had not disabled was the ability to hand the web page displayed on the computer to the iPad so I pushed it all back to the iPad and provided the requested signatures.

Moving On…

Later in the process I encountered the “Next” button issue again. But guess what? I couldn’t had the iPad data back to the computer.

Okay… reinitiate the process on the computer and hope that the entered data had actually been posted to the profile.

Most of it was saved, so back to using the computer.

Moving On…

Finally I got the whole shebang filled out and figured I’d correct whatever was fucked up when I got to the damn appointment.

Then, they wanted me to download their patient portal app on my phone. OH GOD…

That went fairly smoothly, since I knew what kind of bugs were likely to crop up.

On the phone app, instead of a password, they wanted a 6 digit PIN.

I ask you, what the fuck is the point of a PIN when you’ve already saved a perfectly good password in the apple passwords application, and that application is more than capable of presenting that password across all apple devices? Just another fucking thing to remember!

There’s 2 hours of my life I’ll never get back, but it’s done. 

This kind of thing is exactly why you need a manual tester to actually look at software before you publish your bullshit to the world.

There are a lot of people my age for whom this would have been too daunting to complete. I also have to ask, “Why did I give all this information to their clerk when I made the fucking appointment? None of it was entered into their system!” Equally I’m curious why medical expenses are so high if I’m doing the keyboard entry for them. I ask the same question using self checkout at stores.

I’ve started not paying for bags, even though I use them. If I’m doing the work of a cashier, the least they can do is let me take my earnings in a couple of bags.

While I was off the hill the other day getting the car serviced I took care of another little medical annoyance.

I needed to pick up a RX from Walgreens. I’d chosen the Fontana location since it was relatively close to the house. It was a cluster fuck of EPIC proportions. 

I’d placed an RX request via their application on Monday. They sent me an email saying it would be ready on Wednesday and there I was on Thursday trying to pick it up.

They had it, one bitch had it in her hand, a full 90 day supply but even after taking my insurance info, confirming that I could have the RX, they told me I’d have to come back one hour later because they were closed for lunch. Uhhh I was right there, they were right there, the medication was right there and it was 15 minutes till their lunch time.

Their whole process was a complete clusterfuck. Fine! I had lunch, paid $3 for a bottle of coke and $11 for a mostly bread sandwich and waited.

When I was done with lunch, I wandered around the Walgreens, sizing them up for other supplies. I picked up some Flonase while I was there. Then waited in line for another hour to get my ZERO charge bottle of meds.

The delay put me in shitty traffic all the way home.

Walgreens, is probably not going to be my pharmacy of choice. Or at least not THAT Walgreens. It was 107° down there. By the time I got home I was drained. I couldn’t think, or concentrate.

So I lost another day.

I need to find a way to get 90 day prescriptions because I don’t want to have prescription anxiety. You know, “Oh I can’t leave yet, I have to wait for the RX to be authorized and I’m allowed to pick it up,” every month.

I intensely dislike going to pharmacies. I hate everything about their officious “See we’re medical people in our scrubs, we can make you dance hahahaha, we’re so important,” attitude.

No, you pack of idiots, you count pills from one bottle to another bottle. The hardest thing you have to do is decide what size paper bag to put those pill bottles in. The pharmacist is only one of you who has completed higher education.

Perhaps I’m just cranky! 

Next week is the Doctor’s appointment and we’ll be revisiting the BP meds, and other issues.

All I can say is this guy better live up to his reputation and the recommendations. Otherwise I’m going to be really cranky!