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Home > Fellowship Plaza Apt. A202 |
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It has been little over 10 years since my wife had her breast cancer surgery. We used to have Kaiser Permanente up till last year, then because of reasons I was forced to change to Santa Clara Fellowship Health Plan last October.
Since there is no set hospital for me to visit, each insurance holder can choose their own family doctor so I found a list of doctors and started to see which one was suitable to visit. Fortunately, I found a doctor that lived only 5 minutes away and is getting yearly checkup. The only difficult part is, in order to get a blood draw, I would have to find the family doctor designates, and also other many technical things to designated labs.
My wife took a mammogram to see if the cancer returned or is progressing to other spots after yearly after year. This year, in order to check up again, I had my family doctor designate us a place to take the mammogram. After preparing all the necessary documents for the appointment, the person in charge said to bring all the required documents of all the treatment records.
So before I left Kaiser Permanente, I had requested and taken all the medical treatments, how the breast cancer was found, and etc. After finding a CD that contained my wife’s medical history, my jaws dropped. There were literally over 800 pages worth of documents from the 10 years of medical treatment! There were the 2 emergency treatments, and all the family doctor meetings we had, the bi-yearly blood drawing, finding of the cancer and treatment before and after, etc. even all the times I called on the phone and the records were also all there. I was thankful and surprised that a single hospital has held all the record this long.
I knew that United States was a nation that was strong with recoding and saving, but seeing my wife’s record I am reminded of how they take care in keeping all records.
Seeing that the mammogram was all I needed, I read the important document parts and started to print. But alas! The printing process started smoothly, but suddenly it started printing hundreds of pages all at once? I thought to myself, I will just find the parts I will need and leave the rest of it alone. After I chose the parts I needed, I queued up printing spot for the end, but again it started to print over hundreds of pages. I stopped the printer to see, and saw that the same exact spot had been printed again. I have no clue what and why this error is happening.
Even worse, the printer was jammed with paper and had become a problem. I tried to take out the printer cartridge to take out the paper, but for some reason it would not go in. I had spent many hours trying to fix the thing, but from 6th of June, the printer just sat under my table like an ugly duckling. Sure, the printer was used over 10 years so I knew that it would break down sooner or later, but I do regret wasting my time trying to fix it.
The next day I went to the office in attempt to reprint the records in the CD and started to print. But the same problem was starting to persist again. So after wasting about hundred or so pages I was starting to get upset. After calming down, I was messing around with printer setting and saw that it was starting to print one sheet at a time. I did not know that time was flying so fast when all of the sudden, the printer gave a red light? There is an old adage saying, “One who was bitten by a tortoise gets surprised by a pan’s lid.” I thought something had gone wrong with the printer again and noticed that the paper was in fact, ran out.
Unfortunately, I had run out of paper stock that I had put in (about 500 pages). Because I had wasted so much from the printing error, I had to borrow a stack of 500 from the next door neighbor and was finally able to print the mammogram records. All of the documents were combined 450 pages long.
On the 6th of June around 9:30AM I took my wife to the designated doctor for the mammogram. After my wife took the scan, the person who took the scan came back out and requested that I give the documents of the previous records so I gave the entire binder with confidence. She gave me a funny look and said, this was not the required item. I told her that the office assistant said I needed to bring any and all related documents for the mammogram, but she said that the only thing I really needed were of her last checkup only. So, if I heard it properly, I didn’t have to spend the last 2 days painstakingly print out all those materials. All the images that were collected from Kaiser Permanente were in a CD – so I didn’t have to print those hundreds of pages were totally meaningless as they only needed to compare the very last images only. It was such a short and easy task, why did I bother spending all that time, and broken a printer in the process?
I think it was from the mistake of communication. The assistant didn’t say “medical record”, and just said “images”, I would’ve understood and gotten the “images” instead. They should’ve explained more in detail and be more specific. Not only was there a waste of time, if the assistant said I only need the image, it would’ve been simpler. They told me it would take about 2~3 weeks to compare and see the results. I think this was a waste of time not only for me personally, but also wasted the assistant’s time. After 2 days of having problem with my printing and such, my eyes are still very sore.
I have learned from this mistake that, not only I have to communicate well with the other party, but the other party also needs to communicate well when it’s something I do not know well of. I also learned that leaving a record of medical treatments were also very important as well. When I leave a record behind, I need to also leave some traces behind as well. But was that a waste of time and effort in the end? No. I have learned many things, and that holding my wife’s medical record (just the half I miss-printed) as a record was the effort.
(June 12, 2016) |
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Wonderous New Records 
Vain Attempt