The lab at the local hospital took my blood at 8:05 this morning... and no-one's touched it since then, because the phlebotomist skipped the "STAT" on the order sheet while she entered the tests into the computer system.
(Guess how many phone calls it took to figure that out!)
The Cornell nursing station stops answering the phone at 5:00, so no results for me today.
Wooo-hooo!
Please tell me that's not the same hospital where you would give birth.
Posted by: Elizabeth | Wednesday, September 10, 2008 at 11:49 PM
No, they killed off their maternity unit about 10 years ago. They've had huge financial problems -- the college had to bail them out a couple of times -- and now they're owned by some local Catholic chain, complete with a mission statement about "reverencing life" that my mere presence in the building may be violating.
And really, the problem yesterday was that they killed off their in-house lab, too. I actually complained to the phlebotomist twice -- on Monday and Wednesday -- about how they hadn't gotten my HCG out the same day last time, and asked her for the lab's direct number so I could check on things. If she'd been the one to run the test, I don't think there would have been a problem. But no, even for the HCG, they put the blood into a van to the lab they share with the rest of the chain, and whatever info was transferred by the face-to-face contact was lost when the data entry error was made.
One manager I talked to yesterday told me the phlebotomist would get yelled at. Actually? that doesn't make me feel better at all.
See, it's a choice between (a) walking 3 blocks (b) driving 20 minutes to what seems to be a one-woman LabCorp office, except that one woman has an infertile daughter who can't afford IVF (as I learned in January) and I can't take it or (c) driving an hour to my old fertility clinic. I cheaped out.
Posted by: Emma Jane | Thursday, September 11, 2008 at 07:46 AM