Inquiring minds

A couple of years ago, as you may recall, I had a breast cancer scare. It turned out to be only a scare but it was, in fact, pretty scary, and I vowed to get annual gynecological checkups and mammograms without fail from then on.

So, in that vein, several weeks ago I called and made an appointment with my doctor for sometime toward the end of April, the 24th, I think it was, because I had to be at least 365 days after my appointment last year, in order for insurance to cover it.

Having done that, I called the imaging center to make an appointment for a mammogram, which also had to be a year after my last one, and in an effort to not only be responsible about making the appointments, but also to be responsible about taking off work, made the mammogram appointment for the same day so that I could do them both without taking off work twice.

I hadn't gone so far as to schedule an actual day off, though, since we're fairly casual about that here--if you have to take a day off, try to schedule it when you don't have any pressing deadlines, but other than that, we're all adults here, etc. My plan is to take the whole day off, which would be nicer for me than taking two half-days, and that way I don't have to worry about scheduling them either early in the morning or late in the afternoon, to avoid having to drive all the way downtown twice in one day.

So anyway. You can see where this is going, right?

A few days or a week or so later, I had a call on my answering machine to call the doctor's office. I called, they said that my doctor was, unfortunately, going to be on vacation when my appointment was scheduled, so I would have to reschedule. I thought it was kind of odd that they hadn't known she was going to be on vacation on what was probably about three weeks away, but I scheduled it for the first week of May--May 5--then called and rescheduled the mammogram for the same day.

Then, today, Bob called to say that there was a message on the answering machine to call--you guessed it--the doctor's office.

I called, pressed the button for the appointment desk, and got someone who said that, oh, guess what, the doctor is still going to be on vacation when your appointment is set for, in face, she's not going to be back until May 19. So I rescheduled (she did apologize for having rescheduled me twice, so far) for the 22nd, the called and rescheduled the mammogram, and now I'm sitting here why my doctor had a suddenly scheduled vacation, that suddenly got extended for two additional weeks.

At first, I thought the scheduling people just hadn't known about it for whatever reason, maybe she'd just forgotten to tell them, but why in the world would they have srecheduled me, then had to move me forward two weeks? Did they just assume she was going to be gone the normal two weeks, but she was actually going to be gone four? And four weeks? No one really takes vacations of that length, it has to be something else.

Maybe she's having to have some kind of surgery, but then why would they, before it even happens, decide she needs to be off two additional weeks? It's a mystery, and one that I didn't feel comfortable asking about. But I'd sure like to know.