How come it doesn’t seem like the holidays unless you’re in the Urgent Care waiting room for a family member? This last week, my youngest had a fever at the beginning of the week and so we brought her home until she seemed better then she went back to school. Then she got sick again, so after several days of her spiking high fevers, we finally called it and took her to the urgent care.
Even something as simple as going to an urgent care is a little bit fraught these days. Because my husband’s health insurance carrier changed, there is not an available urgent care in our town, but one two towns over. There is an emergency room about 4 miles away, but then we’d have to pay the higher fees plus we might get bumped by more important emergencies. So, we figured at an urgent care we could probably be seen sooner. So, I drove the extra miles only to be told that there were 46 people ahead of us with an estimated wait time of four hours. However, because she was showing a high temperature, a triage nurse could see her and might bump her up if deemed necessary. It was deemed necessary and she was moved up to 25th place in line. Being that it was Christmas Eve eve and my family was coming over for lunch in an hour, my husband drove out and swapped places with me to wait in line with our daughter. Finally, after 3 1/2 hours she was seen and tested and sent home with a prescription for an antibiotic.
We called in the prescription to the local Walgreens that we have been using for the last eight years and they informed us that they do not take our insurance either. They said that the prescription would be $99 if we got it filled there. So then we called over to the Medical Center that was on our insurance and they said they could fill it, but they would have to transfer the prescription via fax.
By that point, it was so late in the day that there wouldn’t be time for them to fill the prescription and come back in the morning. The next morning, we called ahead and the phone operator said that he had no evidence of the transfer of prescription, but we should call the pharmacy and have them “check the fax machine.“ Since the pharmacies hours were going to be cut short because it was now Christmas Eve, I just had my husband drive over there while calling ahead hoping that they could start the process. He still had to wait an additional hour for them to find the literal paperwork before they would fill the prescription.
The good news is we did get the medicine before they closed and it only cost us $36. A quick search of the Internet shows that the medication she was prescribed is common and ridiculously cheap if it’s for animals and not humans. We bought the human version, but still.
