Front Porch: You shouldn’t have to be a pest to get health care in a timely fashion

America is a country with among the most magnificent health care therapies available, technologies that are simply stunning and lifesaving. This is true.

America is a country with the most infuriating health care bureaucracy, wait times and obstacles to accessing that care that a human being can possibly comprehend, no less overcome. This is also true.

I, as well as members of my immediate and extended family, have benefited from the former in degrees that have left us overwhelmed with gratitude. And we have gone through the labyrinth that makes up the flip side of that reality, which has also been soul crushing – even having good health insurance that we pay a hefty price for because it provides for so much that we need.

I have planned and prepared carefully, starting many decades ago when I understood that significant medical help would be necessary in my life, and my husband and I have been fortunate in making sure that insurance was secured and religiously paid for, even when it took too big a bite out of our income, and we had to make adjustments in order to pay the premiums.

But that second statement looms large, and I wonder how those who do not or cannot advocate for themselves or work at finding alternate access roads, survive.

Of late, it’s fortunate that I adhere to the three P’s – polite, persistent, pest – approach to medicine. It doesn’t always work, but applying this philosophy to a current situation has been significant.

Now there’s nothing worse than stumbling into old people’s meandering conversations about this surgery or that, this ailment or that one or hearing about the back-then days, when doctors actually came to your house to treat you. You remember those good old days – you know, when people actually died of polio and the measles.

Oh wait … that’s a subject for another discussion.

Just rest assured, what follows isn’t a tale of symptoms. What it is, however, is how we got fast intervention for something that’s cooking with my husband, and the short version of what it took to get there.

He’d been showing some symptoms, and we’d gotten a preliminary diagnosis from our primary care physician. However, what the doctor suspected was an affliction that is often underdiagnosed in the elderly and wanted to send us to a specialist for confirmation.

First referral was taking too long (in my humble opinion) for a response. I checked in. Apparently, there isn’t a physician in that group that treats for the suspected issue. The next referral also was taking weeks with no response. In early February, I checked in. Yes, they treat for that, and at that moment were scheduling appointments for late May. It was going to take four or five weeks to even process the referral, due to the volume of referrals they were handling, before an appointment could be made.

So we were looking at summer before my husband could get seen. Not satisfactory. If Bruce had what was suspected, there is an intervention that can reverse (to varying degrees) what’s going on with him. If he doesn’t, and it turns out to be the initial diagnosis, then there’s medication he can take that can slow things down.

Either way, times they are a-wastin’.

We have a connection with an executive in the health care system in the Puget Sound area, so I reached out and asked (in pushy-old-lady PPP fashion) if he was aware of any physicians he could recommend there who were taking patients sooner. He got back to us right away and said we’d be hearing shortly from someone.

Two days later, we got a call. The person I talked with arranged to get copies of Bruce’s imaging studies and other reports, and a few days later – it was a Monday – all medical information was there and we had a phone consult. It was agreed that we might proceed, and we learned that the physician we’d need to see had planned to be out of the office the next day, but his trip had been canceled; he’d be in the office and was in the process of scheduling appointments. Could we get there to see him the next afternoon?

Why, yes we could. And did. A several-day, in-hospital procedure and study was arranged for two weeks later, which was done at the end of March, and which revealed that the initial diagnosis was correct and that he did not have the preferred suspected other condition.

Yes, I am deliberately not revealing details of the illness or the facility we dealt with. Not trying to be coy. Bruce has kindly let me write about him in oh so many ways over the past 20 years, but he did ask me to hold off on details at least for a little bit, since we’re still deep into dealing with this.

Oh, and I should mention that we did get a message from the second local referral – while Bruce was in the hospital participating in the study over on the West Side – that they were ready to schedule him for this summer.

I have been made aware that even though Spokane is a pretty major (and darn good) center for all kinds of medical care – drawing people from Eastern Washington, North Idaho, Western Montana, Oregon and elsewhere – there are problems getting enough doctors to cover everything, even here. This is only a part of the problematic side of medicine in America.

Because of persistence, good insurance and a personal connection, we were able to move ahead quickly. But there are so many who can’t.

That’s what this is about. It should not be like this, and I do realize that it is a very complicated matter, involving the insurance industry, physician burn-out, taking on crushing debt to get through medical school, national priorities and a whole lot of other things.

But one shouldn’t have to don chain mail and storm the castle to see a specialist in timely fashion. Not in America (not anywhere, actually), where we claim to be the biggest and best in – well, everything.

How many people die while waiting to get those appointments?

Voices correspondent Stefanie Pettit can be reached by e-mail at upwindsailor@comcast.net.