Quote:
Originally Posted by Dr. Meh
I’ve lucked out thus far and haven’t had any bleeding yet. I’ve heard of some people with excessive bleeding and even one guy who had a lot of pain but no bleeding until it got to his bladder. Then he started having chunks of blood and goo coming out. Turns out he had bladder cancer and had no idea until the stone got there.
That’s irritating to go see a specialist only to be seen by a nurse practitioner! Don’t get me wrong, nurse practitioners can serve a purpose for general issues but they certainly should not be allowed to serve in place of a specialist.
1) Good deal.
2) You are preaching to the choir. It happened to me again with a different specialty about a year later. My PCP has since moved to a different affiliation, so I hope that doesn't happen again. It turned out that the urology consult didn't annoy me too badly because I had decided before I went that they were going to have to do a hard sell to do anything at all invasive, so it was easy to tell them, "Don't call me. I'll call you."
The other consult was a very easy office visit to do a differential diagnosis and determine I had the least severe possibility. That NP gave me a low dose of a med that took care of practically all of my symptoms as well as starting to treat a diagnosis that my PCP had been dealing with ultra-conservatively. I figured that if anyone was being treated by a NP at their clinic that it probably should be me as my issues were so mild. Even my PCP shook her head when I told her that I had been seen by a NP.
If any of my issues that I was referred to either specialty for had been serious at all, I'm afraid that I would have showed my ass upon being told that I was seeing a NP.