Being a patient with a significant medical problem (or problems) is something new for me. For the majority of my life, I haven’t needed to engage with the healthcare system—but time waits for no man, and some decline in health is inevitable.
It’s certainly not much fun, and with the rare exception made for people with outstanding insurance (of which I am not one), it is also expensive. And it is time-consuming! Waiting on hold to make appointments, waiting to get appointments, waiting in waiting rooms, waiting in line at pharmacies…waiting, waiting, waiting.
Then there is the paperwork. I mean, how many times do l have to fill out the same form at the same office? (This implies healthcare systems don’t really trust their EHR.).
For someone like me who prizes and strives for efficiency of effort, this “being a patient” is its own special kind of irritation. I feel like I am in a Monty Python sketch.
Yet being a patient does offer one benefit, at least an intellectual one: it allows me the possibility to observe the healthcare system from a patients perspective within the context of understanding both the physician’s side of things and in relation to my theory on the role of the digital genotyping and phenotyping patients. And that experience nearly makes it all worth it.