You Call Yourself An Eye Doctor?

WARNING! I need to vent.  If you don't want to hear my rant turn away now.

Let me start with a little background info.  Jordan and myself have an eye condition that we inherited.  I spoke about my problems in detail on a separate post.

Jordan's condition is a little different.  He has Coloboma and Nystagmus but his condition is a bit more severe.  We have known for several years now that he is legally blind.  We have always gotten top of the line care from our eye doctor.  We have been to two specialist and Jordan receives vision services through the school district.

This past summer we changed our insurance and our favorite eye doctor was not on their plan.  I had to find a new one for Jordan and this did not make me happy.  I wanted to get him in for a checkup before school starts so I made an appointment with a lady that has a clinic close to our house.

We get to this clinic and from the very beginning I knew things weren't going to be good.  I signed in and checked the box that said "new patient" and went to sit down.  About 10 minutes later (there was no one else in the waiting room) I went up and said, I am here for my son's appointment.  Is there any info I need to fill out. He is a new patient.  The girl looked around a bit and finally decided i did need to fill out some papers and handed them to me.

About 25 minutes later we finally got called back.  The nurse was great! She did a couple things with Jordan (things I thought the Dr should have done) and then said the Dr. would be in soon.  Another 20 minutes later a lady comes in...mumbles her name, and walks over to Jordan.  She has him look at the eye chart for maybe a minute and starts talking about how she is going to refer us to a low vision specialist.  That is fine with me, but I was here to try to get Jordan some glasses and make sure everything was okay for the start of the school year.

She never once mentioned the Coloboma and only briefly mentioned the nystagmus.  She turned to me and said, "You have the same condition? How do they treat it for you?" Really?  Your the eye Dr.  I know these are somewhat rare conditions but you went to school for many years....surely you have heard of them.  On top of that, she didn't even know the schools offered vision services.  Really? Are you kidding me? It's a sate funded program that ALL school districts have.  And you call yourself an eye doctor?

She had Jordan read the chart a few times and then started looking at her notes.  She acted as if she had no idea how to treat a person who was legally blind.  She said there wasn't much she could do.  She gave us a prescription for glasses and said she would find a low vision Dr. who accepted our insurance and would give me a call tomorrow (now today).

I just got off the phone with her and again she acted clueless.  She said I'm sorry.  I couldn't find a low vision specialist.  I said, that's fine...I will find one on my own.  She reinforced again how she was sorry there wasn't anything she could do.

This was my first real experience with someone who had no clue how to help my son.  I wouldn't be so upset about it had she tried a little harder.  She seemed completely clueless.  We were in the office for about two and a half hours and she spend maybe then minutes in the room with us.  The rest of the time was spent just waiting......

I will find Jordan another Dr. He deserves the best of care and she definitely was not.  Jordan is a very strong little boy and is happy that he has some glasses to help him out a little.  If you live in the area and would like to know what Dr I took Jordan to just send me a message.  I don't want to bash them on this blog...that was not my intent.  I just needed to vent about my frustrations with stupid people.

I will post a picture of Jordan when his glasses come in.  He looks so grown up!