STAT

You receive a text message, an email, an updated profile... you reply... then they reply... and the back-and-forth is endless. I read somewhere this phenomenon of our time, it is called Incomplete Communication. And it never really stops, it just gets put on hold. Till the next time you log onto your email, or you check your phone, or you wake up in the morning.

So, with this in mind, I held my stub number 1671 in the hospital waiting to claim my STAT lab results. STAT in medical jargon means "rush". And I paid 50% higher than the usual rip off price to find out if I was sick sooner. There is something wrong, but I am not deathly sick. The results show that my RBCs are low, my monocytes are high, and I do not have Mono.

R and I were having an extraordinarily unhealthy lunch of Pizza Hut and Dairy Queen* while waiting for my STAT results when she asked what she should tell people when they ask why I am not practicing the doctor stuff. I don't like hospitals. I can't imagine working in one, at least not here. Hospitals are the intersection of disease and stupidity. All respect to the doctors mind you.

So after 2 hours waiting for the STAT results which they told me would be out in 1 hour, I was still missing one lab result. The one that tells me if it is viral or bacterial. I left. Let's just go with bacterial and take them antibiotics.

So back to Incomplete Communication and Stat. A hospital is one place where the incomplete communication should be completed STAT. To think that I am one unremarkable outpatient case that did not get what was promised (STAT results), what more the hundreds and thousands of other far more emergent cases out there whose results are stranded between break time and change shift?


*Note: the junk food in the new wing of the hospital is what happens when the owners of the hospital own the franchises of the fast food.