Enough is enough

In the past I have written a little here and there about my love / hate relationship with my RE. I’m a very passive person by nature and like to see and believe the best in people. He is an extremely nice guy. He has a way of making you feel incredibly secure and hopeful in his presence. He has said from day 1 that he firmly believes that I will be able to carry a pregnancy to term and he has not wavered from that opinion. I always leave his office feeling calm and optimistic.

But then I get home and I start thinking about all the things that he does not do for me. After our Clomid cycle with him failed he was pushing us to go forward with injectables. We did not feel comfortable with this and instead wanted to give Femara a try. He refused and said if Clomid didn’t work Femara wouldn’t either. Then the big cyst happened.  J has had an issue with this guy since my first surgery. Fact of the matter is I never should have been put on such a high dose of Clomid (100mg for 10 days) with the amount of cysts on my ovaries, which he did know about as he did many ultrasounds and a SHG before the Clomid. This is what caused the huge cyst and subsequently the loss of my ovary. After the surgery when I called their office to inform them that I had just had an ovary removed I spoke to the receptionist and heard nothing else from them. At that point I was frustrated, I’m not a needy patient, but I felt very abandoned by this.

However, then I found myself pregnant. Being in this community as long as I had I knew I wanted betas and early ultrasounds done, so I felt I had no other choice but the call up this office since they knew my history. I was a bit worried that they’d refuse since I had gotten pregnant naturally but I was accepted back into the fold. He was with me through all my pregnancies. He saw how broken I was after my 2nd loss. He continually tried to encourage me not to give up. He ran the normal RPL panels and informed me they all came back normal. However when the results from my D&C came back he didn’t even call me, instead he e-mailed me the report so I had to come home from work, open my e-mail and read that my baby was a healthy male. Complete breakdown. I just feel like that situation deserved a bit of respect and sensitivity.

When the first beta came back at 18 for this last pregnancy I was extremely nervous. I knew this was low, but he tried to convince me otherwise. I suspected and ectopic but I let him tell me otherwise by talking about finding it early and the first repeat doubling. When we suspected I was having another miscarriage he did perform an ultrasound to check for a gestational sac but when there was no sac he never checked my ovary or that area, if he had he would have seen a mass which was the ectopic. It wasn’t until a week later when my numbers kept rising that he finally came to the conclusion that I had had since the beginning.

The pain started when I was out-of-town. I frantically called his cell number (which he gave to me in case of circumstances like this) but he never answered. I left message after message. He told me if he didn’t answer to keep calling until he did. I called a total of 4 times (over a 45 min period) before I finally decided to call the office directly. I knew the office was closed but I also knew they had an option to be transferred to the on-call doctor. I had no way of knowing if it would be my doctor since there are others in the practice but at this point I didn’t care. We were in the car on the way to the ER when I made the call, and it was my doctor who picked up. While talking to him he asked why I didn’t call him directly. I told him I had multiple times and left messages. He said “Oh, is your area code ***?” I told him yes (it is not a California area code) and he said he doesn’t pick up numbers he doesn’t know since he gets a lot of sales calls. He said he must have forgotten to save my number in his phone. SERIOUSLY?

At this point I was in too much pain to care. That day while in the ER he kept in touch with my doctors and went ahead and agreed with them about the surgery. From there he washed his hands of me. I was told when I got back in town to follow-up with him. When I called to schedule the follow-up I was told they wouldn’t be able to see me till the middle of January. I stressed that I had just had surgery and I needed to see him but there was nothing. I asked if they had received my medical notes and was told no. I went ahead and scheduled the appointment for mid-January. I was able to get in with my OB that week so she has been doing my post-op care.

For the appointment with the RE I again called and asked them to request my medical notes from the surgery so that when I did go in I could discuss things with him. The receptionist acted very put out and like all I was doing was wasting her time. I ended up getting the medical notes from my OB to take to the appointment, but as I was doing so I realized something. My RE…he had NO idea what has been going on. The hospital never contacted him after it was decided I’d have surgery. He never received (or requested for that matter) my records so for all he knows I lost my tube. He has no idea that for the past week I’ve been at my OB’s monitoring my HCG levels because they have still not bottomed out. He has no idea that my OB almost decided to give me another dose of Methotrexate because she was worried about the levels. He has no idea that I came through that surgery intact. But most importantly, to me it feels like he doesn’t care.

Today I called and cancelled my appointment with him. They asked if I wanted to reschedule and I simply said no. I will not be that person who calls someone out because it is not who I am. If they had asked the reason I would have told the that I felt like I was not getting the care I need or deserve from the office and left it at that. If we ever decide to go back to cycling, I will find a new RE. One who I feel will give me the respect of at least acting like what happens to me matters.  I really wanted this to work with him. But I can no longer ignore what J has been telling me for a year. It’s time to be done with this office.