How Not To Treat an Autistic Patient — Part 2 — The Day After, and the Day After That
The Day After
I was still red-eyed and exhausted the next morning, but after copious amounts of coffee, it was back to the phone. First, I called another surgeon I’d had a consult with the earlier in the month. He’d been kind and understanding about my condition, his office had an efficient and compassionate staff, and with any luck, maybe he would take my case and I could still get the surgery sooner rather than later. His office scheduled me an appointment for the next day, Thursday.
As no pain medication was in the offing, I temporarily gave up on my search for a Medicaid- and autism-accepting provider and called back my original pain management practice, the one I had been seeing before I lost my health insurance, in hopes of getting enough medication to allow me to function until my surgery came through (or didn’t).
When I told the scheduler I would run out of medication before the end of the week, she miraculously found an appointment for me for that Friday, just two days away. I would have to pay out of pocket, but I didn’t care. What had happened this week had left me so exhausted, traumatized, and desperate that I didn’t have any bandwidth left to think about anything else.
The Day After That
Thursday, I drove to the surgeon’s office only to find out that I was at the wrong facility. “But they said it was in A_____ when I made the appointment,” I insisted weakly. Another staff member responded, “Oh, the S_______ office is also in A_____.” Notwithstanding how ridiculous that was, this wasn’t the first time something like this had happened to me; being autistic means you tend to miss “obvious” things and your assumptions are often wrong. I didn’t like it, but I was used it, and normally, I would have just handled it.
But that day, still drained from the previous days’ events, I didn’t have enough energy to deal with another setback. In fact, I didn’t have enough energy to summon any response at all, appropriate or otherwise. I just stood there, frozen, at a loss for what to say or do next. The other office just wasn’t going to happen; there was no way I’d be able to interpret a new set of my phone’s GPS instructions. Even just rescheduling felt like more than I could handle.
The receptionist saw the look on my face, or perhaps the lack thereof, and told me to wait a moment while they called the S_______ office and got the surgeon on the phone. Once they did, they relayed that the surgeon said he would not perform the surgery; he didn’t think it would help my pain, which he asserted was atypical for the type of damage I had.
Yet another rejection. My heart sank, and tears started to well up again. I held myself together — barely — long enough to thank them and get back to my car.
And then I started crying again. There was nothing else I could do. The grim reality of my situation, that the surgery wasn’t going to happen any time soon, if at all, finally set in. I sobbed the whole drive home. I didn’t think things could get any worse. But, of course, they did.
