Woes of an apparent hypochondriac

I don't like being cut up, really. I mean, I don't hate it, or particularly fear it overmuch so long as I know there will be anesthetics involved. But it's certainly not how I'd prefer to spend a lazy half hour or so.

I spent a lazy half hour last Friday having a small peice of flesh removed from my right calf to be tested for anything bad ( I have a kinda-sorta-but-maybe-not mysterious tan patch of skin that never faded this summer when the rest of my fake spray-on tan did). It went fairly smoothly.

I had a bit of concern when my doctor first walked in and said, "So, you were saying you have something of concern on your knee, right?" I've never mentioned my knee - either one of them - to my doctor. This is probably because I've never had anything wrong with my knee - either one of them.

I quickly clarified, pointing to (and circling with a finger) the tan patch of skin on my leg. Which was described in my chart, which was sitting on the counter, which she would have seen had she bothered to look at my chart. "Oh, ok, yes!" she replied, and after a moment pointed to where she would make the incision and remove a tiny chunk of flesh. She was pointing to a space well within the tan patch so, confident that we were all on track again, I lay back down and let her do her thing.

The anesthetic burned like a mofo, but only for a few seconds. Then you coould have been slowly, messily sawing my leg into raggedy slices with a rusty hacksaw and I wouldn't have had a clue unless I saw it happening. I felt nothing, which was nice. I left the office with a large bandage on my leg (no limp), and was mildly curious as to why it seemed to be centered a bit to the side of where I thought it ought to be, but didn't worry overmuch. After all, the doctor had pointed to shere she was goign to cut, and that was where she was supposed to.

When I took the bandage off that night to clean the tiny little wound, I discovered that she had not cut where she had said whe would. That, in fact, she had done the biopsy a full inch-and-a-half outside the patch of darker skin, on perfectly normal flesh.

My doctor, in whom I have been steadily losing faith over the last two years, sliced up the wrong part of my leg.

Needless to say, I am ever so lightly peeved.

My faith in this doctor is now completely shot. There have been several other occurrences that have had me silently questioning her competence. Not only did she randomly change a diagnosis from one session to the next, without explaination (and no mattter how many times I've corrected her on it, still sticks with the second, incorrect, random diagnosis), she's also given me attitude with the implication that I'm a bit of a hypochondriac and a waste of her precious time. This was after I came in to see her because my spleen was still swollen from Mono (long after it wasn't suposed to be any more) exactly one week after she told me I should worry and come see her immediately if it was still swollen in exactly one week.

So, I'll take my Type-A, over-worried, high-strung (her description of me, to me, when I was worried about that darned spleen), apparently hypochondriac self to a new doctor, one who has tons of time on their hands to deal with all of my myriad unimportant problems. Because, you know, that's what I'm paying them for.

I'm not paying to be degraded, ignored, and to have medical procedures screwed up by someone's lack of either intelligence or the ability to simply pay attention.

Have I mentioned how much I loathe stupid people?