Our new favorite place to visit--Urgent Care...

Seriously, I am so anti-urgent care. It's a place to go and wait for hours amongst many sick and germy people, and then be seen by a Dr who may be great but it seems most often is rushed and NOT a pediatric doctor, and I always doubt them. If at all possible I always try to get my kids seen by the pediatrician if they really need something. Mean, I know. But it does seem like we almost always end up going the doctor on a Friday, when I just don't know how much worse they might be the next day and certainly don't want to take them to urgent care. Well I guess I changed my tune and officially made it our favorite hang-out. THREE times in one week. Micah had a fever last Friday night and got sicker throughout the weekend. I actually held off until Monday, but when I called on Monday morning, Pediatrics didn't have any available appointments and said to take him to urgent care. Trav happened to be home sick with the flu, so I figured this was the best day engage in such a pleasant adventure, when I didn't have to haul the entire happy and joyful gang. So we went and spent 4 hours of time wishing I could be accomplishing great things, for the doctor to look in his ears and say he had an ear infection and gave us antibiotics for him. I must say, that after a couple of days of the grumps, it was a great relief to see his big smile return and remind us of how fun he is.

So then, again on a Friday night, this time during the night (like 2 a.m.)--Noah came down and told me his ear was hurting badly. So I hugged him for awhile and gave him some motrin with a glass of milk and sent him to bed, thinking "great". Noah has had so many infections, that by the time he complains like that, the eardrum is about of perforate, which makes him feel much better, but then....well, he has a perforated eardrum with yucky stuff draining from it and I feel horrible. So sure thing the next morning, that's what happened and Noah and I (and Micah)went to urgent care to get it looked at. The doctor prescribed eardrops this time. I was a horrible mom and not a good advocated for my own son, because the doctor looked at the obvious problem, and didn't even check his other ear or his throat or lungs. And I totally almost said "Can you maybe check everything else, too?"--but didn't. What's up with that? To further make my faults be known, I picked up his eardrops and later went to give them to Noah, and couldn't find them anywhere. I looked for a couple of hours, scouring the house, called Krogers, and later went to Krogers myself to look and it was nowhere.

I called urgent care to check out my options and they said Tricare would only fill a prescription once, and if they gave me another I would have to pay out of pocket. Or the other option was to have the doctor put in the Rx to the pharmacy on base and pick it up on Monday. Since the small tube of medicine cost a whopping $145 (at the time I didn't know it was THAT much), I opted for the base pharmacy on Monday. Then last night at 2 am, Noah came down and said now his other ear was hurting. And by this morning his left membrane also perforated! The poor child. So I called again to see what they thought, and they did end up writing another prescription. So while the rest of the family got to go to church and be spiritually uplifted--Noah, Micah and I went to get the prescription and talk to the nurse there (why don't they just let you talk to the doctor? they walk 2 feet to ask him questions and relay them on the phone and it would be so much better to talk to him myself!)> Then went to Krogers and she looked up the out of pocket cost, then said she would try it and if (or when) it didn't go through, she would call and explain that one bottle got lost and that now his other ear was also infected. By some miracle, it went through, and she didn't even have to call. Not that anyone really wants to know this whole long story, but tomorrow I am just going to take him in the the Pediatric clinic anyway and get on a real plan...He actually has seen an ENT on base here and they are scheduling him to get another set of tubes one of these days--possibly as late as May. Sheesh. In the mean time, 90% of the time we have to speak very loudly for the child to even hear us, and he sits in the front row at school, but still just watches and follows some of the time. He thinks he hears most of it, though. Hmm. It's a good thing he doesn't struggle in school to start with.