PAIN IN MY ASS

I woke up early and paid about $30 for a Zipcar today for the pleasure of a steroid injection to take pressure off a nerve. The pain has been particularly intense lately -- in fact it’s frequently been agonizing -- and I’ve been looking forward to this appointment since early November.

But after one round of filling out forms at St. Elizabeth’s Medical Center, in Brighton, and as I was being told to fill out another, a nurse warned me that it was extremely unlikely that I would get my injection today. I didn’t.

Today was just the day the doctors at St. Elizabeth’s looked at me to find out all the stuff that the doctors at Tufts-New England Medical Center found out last month. They would probably have insisted on doing it anyway, but I still got criticism for not getting my medical records from one doctor to another. That’s correct: In the five weeks I had to wait for my pain management appointment, those records had not been exchanged. My fault, right? Especially because, since being told I wouldn’t actually be treated that day, and being in supreme, shrieking, exquisite pain, I had gone in with a bad attitude.

I told the doctor that, when I called to make the appointment, that might have been a good time to tell me that I wouldn’t actually be getting treatment. I also told him that would have been a good time -- another would have been any time between when I made my appointment and kept it -- to tell me that it was somehow my responsibility to get my medical records from one institution to the next.

The doctor agreed I was hardly the only person who has fallen afoul of this medical-records problem. Indeed, it happens all the time, he said, this flagrant showing-up-without-records. I repeated my suggestion that his office could solve that by telling new patients what they needed to do to facilitate the doctors’ jobs. He repeated that it wasn’t his office’s responsibility.

So much for preventive medicine. I thought doctors would want to save time, since they’re so short on it that even people in pain must wait five weeks for an appointment, but there is clearly another principle at work here.

Capping the appointment was the doctor, embodying Hippocrates, advising me to apologize to his secretary for my “belligerence” because if I was going to be coming back, it was only through her good graces that I would get prompt appointments.

And this is a pain management clinic.

(This is also the place that had me leave a message for a doctor who was out of town. I blew about a week waiting for a call back. Again, an interesting approach to take for people suffering.)