January 2008: I Meet Doctor Evil

With a normal HSG, Dr. J was ready to do an insemination. Her instructions to me were simple enough: three days after I started my period, I was supposed to start taking Clomid, which as Dr. J put it, would give me a “juicy” egg. Day 11, I was to start using the ovulation predictor kit. When I got a positive result, I'd call in.

“What if I get a positive result on a weekend?” I asked.

“The doctor on call will come in,” she replied.

Things started out okay—the Clomid didn’t give me hot flashes, as it sometimes can. I started testing on Day 11, but since I don’t usually ovulate until around Day 16, I was pretty sure I have some time. So I went down to visit my brother in L.A. on that same day.

Day 12, while at my brother's, I got a positive. Shit. I paged the on call doctor and started looking at changing my flight. When he called me back, I was excited and the adrenaline was pumping—I might actually get pregnant this month! I thought to myself, feeling triumphant for no other reason.

I’m sorry to say that Dr. S knocked me off that cloud and then some. I started the conversation by telling him I had a postive result on an OPK and needed to come in for an IUI. He interrupted irritably with, “What’s an OPK?” After a series of similar questions, I thought maybe I had paged the wrong person and was really talking to an opthamologist or something. So I asked him if he was a gynecologist. He didn't like that much.

Anyway, the long and short was that Dr. S would do whatever it took to avoid coming in on the weekend. He told me that I should wait until Monday, because I might not have ovulated by then anyway. And that I should have called on Friday, because the medical assistant is the one who lays out the instruments for a weekend IUI, and those instruments were locked in a cabinet. Medical assistants are important and all, I get that you need them, but hellllo—you’re the doctor—can't you open the cabinet? And why would I have called on Friday, if I didn’t know I needed to until Saturday? I don't normally call the doctor's office with a daily update. "Yep, nothing new today. Peed on my stick. Negative." We went around and around. I kept telling him this is what my doctor said to do, he kept telling me it was impossible or unnecessary because I could just come in on Monday and the cabinet was locked. Finally, he asked if we were bringing the "specimen" with us. I explained that we wanted my husband to give it there, so it would be fresh, and asked if that was okay.

What he said next made me sure this guy was not coming within in 50 feet of me if I didn't have my pants on. I mean, there's a perfectly nice way to say, “There’s no facility designated for that purpose, but he’s welcome to use the restroom." Maybe like I just said it, for example. But what he said instead was, “Sure, he can ejaculate in the bathroom if that’s what he wants to do.” I mean, I get that doctors aren’t etiquette experts, but they don’t need to be inappropriate dickheads either, right?

So in the end, he didn’t do the IUI, and I went in Monday to find out that it was too late to have one, I’d already ovulated. The one good thing I got out of this is that Dr. J wasn’t available Monday morning, so I got Dr. F instead. Dr. F didn’t have sympathetic mime frowns. She was to the point, no nonsense. I liked this about her, and I didn’t feel like crying when I talked to her, even though I wasn’t going to get pregnant that month. And she apologized about Dr. S, and said he just didn’t want to come in because he was a lazy bastard (or something sort of like that, just more professional sounding) and he had a key to the cabinet, and I should write a letter. So I did, and I changed doctors. Dr. F from there on out.

I am a big letter writer. When I get bad service, and it doesn’t get sorted out over the phone, a scathing missive always feels good, even if it goes right into the circular file. I don’t know what happened with my letter, but I do know this—Dr. S got fired. Well, he left the medical practice suddenly, and I heard through the grapevine that he got fired. I am not naïve enough to think that my complaint had anything to do with it, but I will say that any guy who was that big a jerk to me is probably that big a jerk to everyone. Like my grandma always says, he didn’t know me from Adam. It wasn’t personal. He was just an asshole.