When Citygirl was a toddler, ear infections were the thing for her. Between germs from daycare, my walk-in and her dad's ER, she was a snot factory a great deal of the time. But ear infections always seemed to happen on a Saturday afternoon, or frequently in the late evening. Options for obtaining treatment were clearly limited, but to be fair the ER pre-covid was not typically as bad as it is now.
Babygirl seems to have the same life plan. The number of times that she has fallen ill on a weekend or a holiday is actually fairly astonishing.
Most recently she began with some cold symptoms Friday. The fever (which we ALWAYS have to do something about) began, of course, on Sunday.
I had to run some errands, so I picked up a couple of packs of Covid tests. She tested positive.
I put a call into the Transplant Team at 1:25 PM. About 2:10 I called again, and was told that the "page just went out to the doctor a few minutes ago" and to give it more time. I mean, what was the answering service doing for 45 minutes? I called a 3rd time at 3:05 PM. The answering service was unable to determine if the doctor had actually received the page. I mean, what the actual DUCK is going on here?
At 3:31 the doctor finally got back to me, since Babygirl was in bed asleep. I told him that we had 2 basic problems:
1) Since she is acutely ill, should she keep her appointment in Rochester in the morning? I mean, nobody wants a Covid factory in a transplant center.
He gave the entirely sensible and why-didn't-I-think-of-it answer: Call them tomorrow and have them change it to virtual. Well, duh. I do that in my office all of the time!
2) Since her immune system is being deliberately trashed to keep the transplant alive, should she get an antiviral like Paxlovid? The doctor waffled on that for a moment, checked he medication list and recommended Lagevrio instead, because it doesn't interfere with her medications. "Good, good - could you send that to our pharmacy?"
Well, apparently although he knows what SHOULD be used he won't call it in because that's family practice's job, since they treat Covid regularly, and he himself has never written a prescription for it.
WHAT the ACTUAL DUCK.
So I called our doctor at 3:41, knowing it was about a 30-1 chance that he'd be the on-call. I knew that he'd phone it in, but an on-call doc who has never met her would either call it in or send us to the ED. We got the call at 4:01 PM.
It was not our doc, but the on-call guy took option 3. "Why can't she have the Paxlovid?" I explained the drug interaction, and he said, "Let me do some research and call you back."
Well, that's entirely sensible but not helpful for my level of anxiety in this moment.
While I waited I called the 2 local 24 hour pharmacies to see if either of them had a supply of this Unicorn Drug. The farthest one had two full doses. It seemed safer than the closer one that only had one bottle.
The oncall doc called back at 4:12 and told me that to use the Paxlovid "the math is just to complicated." Well, alrighty, then. He did call in the Lagevrio, and we started it Sunday evening.
To add some extra flavor to all this: I took Monday off to go Rochester, but instead I called at 8 AM to reschedule her to video. It turns out the Monday appointment had been cancelled, and replaced with an appointment LAST THURSDAY which we obviously missed.
She's scheduled for a video visit on Wednesday.
Meanwhile, at about 1 AM today somebody drove an icepick into my left ear and filled my left nostril with snot. COVID test was positive this morning. I called family practice at 8:32 AM. I am still, at 3:12 PM, awaiting an answer. I'm doing the recall now.
DeeDee
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