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| - It's free so we're not supposed to complain, right? We're just supposed to take it and be grateful. Here's what I've learned after four years of getting medical treatment here: every doctor appointment I've had has been at least an hour late, it takes at least an hour to check into the pharmacy, two hours for in-person refills, two days for refills by phone, and usually a 2 hour wait at the lab if you're lucky enough that your doctor *actually* puts the order into the computer system. So if you take off work for an appointment here you might as well take the whole day off. The hospital is crowded and slow, slow, slow. If you call to get an appointment the closest one is usually two or three weeks away.
I had my baby here in July of 2014, and I would like to share my experience.
At 7 weeks pregnant, you are forced to attend a class. At the class, you learn:
1) Unless you have Tricare standard, you are forced to have your baby at Mike O'Callaghan.
2) You will be put into either the family practice or familiy medicine residency and you have no control over this. In FMR you see one doctor for all of your visits, and in FP you get whoever showed up for work that day.
3) They make you fill out this survey that is given to some organization on base and they will call you relentlessly wanting you to come in for classes and wanting to come to your house and inspect it for the baby's safety.
4) You get a "goody bag" mostly filled with junk information and coupons.
I saw Dr. Hawks for my entire 10 months and he was amazing. He was the most empathetic, caring, professional doctor I've ever had. I wish I could still go to him for my appointments.
At some point you will have to go in a do a blood glucose test. You go to the lab really early in the morning and they draw your blood and give you a bottle of sugar water to drink. And then you wait an hour and they draw blood again. Then repeat that. I was unlucky that day and got a new phlebotomist and they stuck me 7 times that day. I had bruises all over my arms.
If you hit 40 weeks they will force you to come in for a non-stress test. I had a chaotic hot mess of a time there for that. Their brand new state of the art non-stress test room is like a dark closet...literally a 5x10 room with THREE reclining chairs in it with curtains inbetween people. And there's a bathroom at the end of the room so people keep bumping into you to use the bathroom if you're on the end. It took the tech 50 minutes to do my non-stress test. I saw 3 people come and go for theirs while I was there.
At 39 weeks the doctor started pressuring me about getting induced. I had heard horror stories about being induced and the rate of c-sections so I was less than thrilled. In the end, Dr. Hawks let me go one week past my due date and then stripped my membranes at about 10 am. I went home and by 4 PM I was having hard contractions. I waited until 9 PM when the contractions were 4 minutes apart and called labor and delivery. They told me I was probably just dehydrated and to take a bath or drink some tea. I told them no, I'm in labor, I'm coming in. I get there and I'm in a lot of pain, with contractions every 3 minutes. They check me and I'm at 6 cm. A Dr. Slappy (I'm not making this up) comes in and tells me I have to stop making noises. She has obviously never had children or is just mean. The anesthesiologist who did my epidural was a complete dick. He asked a million questions and he got visibly frustrated with me when I was having a contraction and couldn't answer right away. He rolled his eyes and huffed. Zero compassion or empathy. I'm sure he's probably tired of dealing with people who are in pain but he needs an attitude adjustment. My baby was delivered by Dr. Hawks and it was a beautiful experience. I was discharged less than 12 hours later. You can't get any sleep there because they wake you up every 30 minutes to take your blood pressure or give you a pamphlet about not shaking your baby and stuff like that. They make you watch a discharge video and you are forced to meet with a lactation consultant and they give you a million pamphlets and I felt like "enough already!!! I want to go home". Oh and the only complaint I have about Dr. Hawkes is he sewed me up wrong...I have a weird flap of skin in my lady parts that was never there before.
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