A treat

My experience today dealing with the finding-a-doctor situation was so awful that I had to treat myself to something special for dinner.  I'm also planning on having a bit of Amaretto later.

I foolishly spent a lot of time looking through UW and other websites again for a good match, i.e. a female primary care doc with internal medicine training.  Then I tried to check out the ones I found with my insurance company, going online to their website, only to discover that they'd changed their sign-in procedure.  Now I had to put in my password, which I did not remember, so I went to the page for changing my password.  In order to do that, I needed to answer two Security Questions to which I had provided answers when I signed up.  Well, the website insisted that the second answer was incorrect.  So I put it in again, and again it was rejected.  A third try locked me out of the program.

So I decided to call the company, even though their phones were still on the fritz.  Got connected to a representative who asked lots of questions about my browser and what version of Google Chrome I was running.  Who knows?  Then she said she'd have to send the problem to their technical support, who would get back to me IN FIVE TO SEVEN BUSINESS DAYS.

She then offered to help me find a physician by looking through her own website.  I wasn't optimistic, but we got down to it.  She found a couple who were listed with the company as accepting new patients who were in fact not doing so, and a third who has closed her practice.  After one and a quarter hours on the phone, I gave up.

So now I have no access to the insurance company's website.  I've put in a call to my insurance agent to talk about switching to another insurance plan for the coming year.  Still have no new doctor.

I'm pleased to say that I laughed a lot during that phone call and kept my cool throughout, which was difficult since the music playing while I was on hold was the dreariest dirge imaginable.  I told the representative, 'if you were suicidal when you made the call, you'd kill yourself before it ended.'

But, as Scarlet O'Hara said, tomorrow is another day.