The conclusions I leap to must have actual springboards in front of them, but sometimes I think they’re justified.
Yesterday I found a missed call from an unknown number. Nothing unusual. I then checked my email to find that my Patient Husband had sent an email at about the same time: he’d gotten a call at work from a doctor looking for me. This was her number, and he thought this was her name.
Neither the name nor the number were familiar, and in fact the phone number was from Angeltown, where we lived three years ago. My Patient Husband added, “They might just be letting you know you’re three years late for your annual physical.”
Looking at the facts, it was obvious what happened: the doctor had called our Angeltown number, and when that didn’t work, she called my emergency contact, which was my husband’s work number. Then, having gotten my home number from him, she called but didn’t leave a message. Someone very much wanted to reach me.
I googled the number to find the doctor, and she was the head of Infectious Diseases at Angeltown’s Green Hospital. Oh-kay.
My first thought was that they’d just now realized that when I’d delivered Kiddo#3 lo these many years ago, some nurse had been exposed to a weird strain of virus and the class action suit had just now been settled and I needed to be notified. Ha-hah.
I called the doctor, and the receptionist said she couldn’t find anything about me in the system, but she’d give the doctor my number and have her call back.
After hanging up, I remembered I’d visited my local doctor for something minor last week (turned out to be a muscle strain) and while there, they’d run a test to see if I needed antibiotics. I do know that the Infectious Diseases people are notified when someone turns up with a really bizarre strain of whatever-they-have, and although my local doctor had claimed my test was totally negative, who knew?
But why would they have contacted an out-of-state hospital? Wouldn’t they have gone within their own network? And yet this was the obvious conclusion.
Ten minutes later, the receptionist called back, and now I know the full story. Are you ready for this?
1) They hadn’t been trying to reach me at all. There was another patient with a similar name, and they grabbed my file by accident. (We both laughed about that. A lot.)
2) The other call that had come in at exactly the same time was from a fund-raiser for the March of Dimes.
3) Really, no one wanted to talk to me at all because health-wise, I’m just not interesting enough.
In one of my science classes, the teacher made us memorize this: “Positive correlation doesn’t necessarily indicate causality.” I tell that to my kids all the time, and here you see it in action.
And perception is everything. I think I would have thrown on a biohazard suit. lol
I figured by then that whatever dreadful, rare disease I’d been exposed to was already all over the house, since I’d been breathing in it and touching things. LOL! But I did momentarily luxuriate in the thought of what I’d do if I were confined to an isolation wing in a hospital for a week or so, feeling fine: the books I”d bring, my laptop, my yarn…oh, and make sure to bring the charger for the Kobo. Heh.
In fact, maybe I should call back that doctor and tell her I have the sniffles… 😉
Congratulations on being really boring, health-wise. That’s the kind of bore I want to be.
I figure if the doctor falls asleep during one’s annual physical, that’s just about boring enough. 🙂
You lived in a place called Angeltown? Is that coincidence or inspiration?
Fabrication. 🙂