James, is that you?

Ok, here's the thing.
I had a doctor's appointment yesterday, a follow up to my spinal surgery in Julu, or should I say July.
Anyway, my appointment was for 1:15 so I got there at 1PM and as soon as I got to the reception area they told me that the doctor was running late because he had to perform an emergency surgery that morning, and that his Saginaw office was supposed to call me, but they didn't, and the Tawas Office, the office that I was at, had called me, but they had called me after I had left, so they told me that my appointment would be at least an hour to an hour and a half late, so I said what should I do, and they said, you can sign in and come back in an hour or so, or you could just wait in the office, or you could just reschedule, well, I didn't want to reschedule because I had already been rescheduled once, and I didn't want to set around the office, so I signed in and told them I'd be back in an hour.

Now I could have came home and waited, but I didn't, I went and walked around the Evil Empire for awhile and then I went to the Burger King and had a hamburger kids meal, the toy sucked by the way, and then I went back to the doctor's office, but I still had about a twenty minute wait, so I just stayed in the car and read the book I had brought with me, The 158 Pound Marriage by John Irving, yeah, the guy who wrote Garp, and the Hotel New Hampshire, and Cider House Rules, and it's about wife swapping, and it took place in the early 70's when wife swapping was all the rage, but I digress ...

At 2PM I went back inside and checked back in and they told me it would be a few minutes, well, the few minutes turned into 45 minutes, but actually I didn't mind too much, because I had gotten interested in my book, and the time passed by fairly quickly.

So, when I saw the doctor I told him that I still had a lot of pain, then he put me through some exercises, you know, push forward, pull back, stand up, one leg up, the other leg up, and then he said that he wanted me to get some x-rays.

Ok, since the doctor's office is in the hospital all the staff had to do was write up a work order and I could walk over to the x-ray department, get the x-rays taken, and walk back to the doctor's office and get my results.

Sounds simple right? Well, yeah, but you didn't factor in the mass stupidity of the doctor's staff.

I got to the x-ray department and turned in my work order and then sat down in the EMPTY waiting room. After about ten minutes the x-ray tech came in and asked if I were James, I said no, and she then asked if there had been anyone else in the waiting room, and I said no, she then looked perplexed, but I of course knew what had happened because they had fucked it up the last time I had come in for an MRI. So I told the tech that it was my work order, but the receptionist who had filled it out, while she was carrying on non work related conversations with three other staff members, had put the name of the patient before on the work order instead of mine, so the tech called the doctor's office and got it all straightened out, and blah, blah, blah, I got my x-rays taken and went back to the doctor's office to get the results.

Well, it was all pretty anticlimactic after that. The doctor looked at the x-rays, said that I hadn't healed completely, but that was to be expected, and there weren't any complications, and he wanted to see me in six more weeks, unless I wasn't hurting and in that case I could just cancel the appointment.

So, that was it, except that the receptionist who filled out the work order tried to blame me for her mistake by saying that I was there the whole time she was filling it out and should have caught her mistake, but I was just so relieved that nothing was wrong with my neck that I just let it slide. I'm like that at times.