A Diagnosis Follow-Up

Following up on my previous post as I said I would, I still do not have anything official from one of the best children’s psychological and developmental teams in the entire nation. It’s much simpler than you may think – they aren’t sitting in the lab mulling over volumes of brainwave data to calculate some probability; hell, if that is ever going to happen we haven’t gotten to that part yet.

No, it turns out that every appointment I had with the Children’s Hospital – ranked 7th in the nation overall – was either canceled in error, rescheduled without just cause, or just plum canceled because the doctor couldn’t make it.

Was I furious? I still am. Children’s still owes me a phone call that tells me when I can send in Mr. AS for his 2-session psychological evaluations. I’d certainly hoped to do them between the time we return from Japan (a different post I’ve not written yet) and the time kindergarten starts, but that’s a 3-week span and the timing doesn’t seem likely.

In recap, this evaluation was initially scheduled in December, 2007 for May this year because that was the first available appointment; it was initially scheduled as a 6-hour full eval in one session. Show me a 5-year old child that can tolerate 6 hours of medical torture and I’ll take away their medication. Exactly one day before our appointment, the hospital called to cancel it “because the insurance company needs yada yada yada first…”. I simply said to the appointment line worker “perhaps you could have considered that in the gap of 6 months that I’ve spent waiting for this appointment as to avoid such a conflict” and I guess I struck the magic note on her marimba or something. The very next day I was in their office meeting with the clinical psychologist getting my business handled.

So, I’m sorry to say to my readers that I still “got nothin'” to confirm what I already know, as I said in my last post. But, as a parent of the kid enduring this, I just want it to be done with so we can move forward.