I finally had my first of three psych eval appointments this afternoon - yeahhh baby! It's been a long wait - I originally called on January 12, almost four months ago, to schedule the eval. The first appointment was set for February 23, which seemed like a long way away (six weeks), but I was patient. Little did I know how patient I would need to be.
In mid-February, I got a call from the doctor's new receptionist informing me that the doctor would be out of town on February 23 and the two weeks after that and that the office needed to reschedule me for March 23 instead. I was not at all happy, but very much wanted to stay with this doctor, so I took the opportunity to practice a little more patience.
I chose the psychologist, Dr. Sean Flynn, based on the recommendation of my surgeon and other patients in my WLS support group (the word "fabulous" has popped up a lot), both from those who saw him for the psych eval and those who see him as a therapist. My hope is to continue working with him post-surgery, so I thought it would be best to have the evaluation with him, even if it meant four more weeks of waiting.
Then I got a call from Dr. Flynn himself informing me that he couldn't do an evaluation on March 23, and that he needed to reschedule me to early May. I wanted to shriek like a banshee but instead behaved like a grown-up (a
manly grown-up) and explained politely but firmly that I had been waiting since January and didn't want any more delays. The doctor apologized profusely, but explained that his old receptionist had left in January and that he'd had a series of temps filling in who had mis-scheduled him, double-booking evaluations and making it impossible to see existing patients.
According to him, the temp had just scheduled my first appointment without the two required follow-up visits. Even if I had the first appointment on March 23, he wouldn't be able to schedule the second until late April or early May, and the third (final) appointment until sometime in May at the earliest. He proposed scheuling the first visit for May 7, the second for May 14, and the third for May 21. That way, they would be all scheduled up front, and since he was scheduling them himself using his calendar, there would be no danger of getting bumped again. Plus, the final appointment wouldn't end up being much later than it would have been if we had kept the first one on March 23. So I practiced some more patience.
Finally, I got to today's date without any part of me exploding. I met with the doctor for about 45 minutes and then took the delightful MMPI2 (500+ questions) and another, similar, true/false test with 165 questions. My hand is curled permanently from filling in 700 bubbles with a No. 2 pencil, but it's over. I will be done with the evaluation process in two weeks and then my surgeon's office will submit my case to PacifiCare for approval. I am inching closer day by day. Another small step forward
Yet another small step forward (finally!)
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