Trapped at the Doctor's: Endless Waiting, With Two Four-Year-Olds and a String of Work Emergencies

11/19/2009

The tired-looking woman at the doctor’s office shoves a towering stack of paperwork at me. After relentless haranguing by the boys' school, we’re here at the D.C. branch of a national HMO to get their age-four shots.
 

And it doesn’t bode well that we’re greeted with at least half a trunk’s worth of dead tree. (Can’t they just Xerox what I filled out last time? It’s exactly the same.)

When I’m finally done furiously writing what I’m sure nobody will ever read—I’m reminded of those college blue-book tests—I plunk it down on the front desk.

A nurse looks up, calls out, “You know, there are four people in front of you. Gonna be a while.”

“WHAT? Why so many in front of me? How did this happen?” As it is, it’s a bad day to be missing work. We’re in the middle of 18 health care-reform-related emergencies, I’ve taken on a huge new project, and then there are the usual Web fires.

“Dunno. Just the schedule today.” The nurse just looks at me, impassive. All she’s missing is the bubble gum to snap. “You wanna reschedule?”

“No!  I had to upend my schedule for this as it is! I just hope it goes fast!” I stride back to my seat, fuming.

For the next two hours—yes, two hours!—we wait. While I frantically try to schedule meetings on my BlackBerry—thinking, there has to be a better way than finger-punching these microscopic keys—the kids throw stuff around the waiting room and periodically dive-bomb me.

When we're finally shown to an examining room, a nurse takes some readings, scribbles on a chart, and leaves. And then….you guessed it, we wait some more. At least another half hour more.

It’s past the boys’ lunch time, well into their nap time, and they’re getting VERY CRANKY. And now I'm supposed to undress them and get them into those freezing-cold paper things. They don't comply.

Bzzzzzzzt! Bzzzzzzzt! My BlackBerry starts going bananas:  “EMERGENCY: Link going to porn site—FIX IMMEDIATELY!”

Well this is perfect timing. My eyelid twitches as I watch the responses pop: “Where’s the link? WTF?? What porn site?? Can Bridget fix it?”

No! Bridget can’t fix it. She’s stuck in prison, AKA the doctor’s office, trying to convince her distraught four-year-old to don a paper dress. And, unfortunately, the worst is yet to come.

In walks the doctor. She’s perfectly nice. Just two hours and 45 minutes late. She does a quick exam of both boys, signs off on their shots, and hands me referrals for an allergist (for T-Rex) and an ophthalmologist (for both of them). Done!  Well, until somebody has to haul them to all those appointments.

Today, all we have left is the big event: the shots. But still. We. Have. To. Wait.

By the time the nurse arrives with her tray of doom, the kids are pelting each other with tongue depressors. I’ve long since given up.

Next is the part every parent dreads:  I have to hold down each of my children while a stranger sticks ginormous needles into their legs. In this case, five needles a kid. When she’s done, both boys are crying boulder-size tears.

“Can we go now?” I ask, head pounding, angry at the whole situation.

“No,” says the nurse. “I still gotta do your paperwork.”

The door slams shut, and I’m left with my howling, half-dressed kids. Perfect time for my ShackleBerry to start spazzing again. “Bzzzzzzzt! Bzzzzzzzt! BZZZZZZZZZT! Contract finalization meeting: 15 minutes.” Uh. No way. Not gonna make it. And no, I'm not going to call in from the doctor's office.

I turn to my hungry, tired, sniffling, needle-struck kids.

“Guys,” I say. “You know what we’re going to do? We’re not going to wait any more. We’re going to go get you some stickers. Right now!” The wailing stops for a second. “Stick-owz?” asks Punk hopefully.  I take them by the hands and march them off to find a nurse. Or tech. Or someone with access to stickers. I don’t give a continental hoot who.

It takes a while—everyone’s at lunch or something— but we finally track down our shots nurse. “We need some stickers please. NOW!!”

“Well, OK,” she says grudgingly.

“And may I also have those papers? We’ve been here over four hours.”

She hands them over, somewhat sheepishly, I think (I later find out some are missing), and we bolt. Enough is enough.

Driving the kids to school, feeding them chicken sandwiches and cupcakes I scrounged from a food cart, I make an executive decision: I am going to switch us to more expensive health insurance. Immediately if not sooner.

There is no reason to wait four and a half hours to get five lousy shots. That’s almost an hour a shot.

If I Were President There’d Be Child Care at Work

08/21/2009

It’s what every new, work-at-office mom dreads more than anything. More than the high-stakes PowerPoint presentation that freezes after five minutes. The crabby colleague kerfuffle. The string of reply-all e-mails that’s lost its beginning.

The grim reality of it sets in when, right in the rosy glow of second trimester, right after you’re finally done with the puking, your mother says, “So, it’s about time you started researching child care, huh?”

Oh crud. Oh no.

Oh yes, there’s no way around it. You’re faced with the dreaded prospect of Finding Good Childcare (FGC).

You put out feelers to your female colleagues with kids, and the news is not good. “Yeah, good luck with that,” is a typical response. Fellow moms are sympathetic, for sure, but also war-torn.  They, typically, have been battling with FGC for years—trying this and that, missing work, and worrying about being mommy-tracked.

Consider the options: You can hire a nanny for the price of another mortgage, especially when you add the insurance and vacation time that’s becoming standard.

Or you can try for an au pair, if you have the extra bedroom, a chunk of change, and the willingness to bet on someone who might think taking your child to watch beer pong is a great idea.

Then there are the nanny shares with other parents, which can save you money but mean a lot of schedule juggling. And if the nanny gets sick or quits? Whoops, you’re SOL.

That leaves one other FGC option: daycare. Ugh. We're talking staff shortages and germs passed around like hot sauce at a chili cook-off. And every time your kid picks up one of those germs, you have to miss work (more on this later).

Another problem with daycare is the mad daily dash to drop off and pick up the kids—and if you're a minute late to collect them, you get fined!

Weighing these dismal options, a good many moms (and dads) decide to stay home with the kids. The benefits are obvious: Guaranteed quality child care. Bonding time. No worries about germs, sick days, traffic, fines, or beer pong.

I'm not saying there aren't also some…issues with staying home. The more time you spend with children under five, the higher your risk of saying things like, "don't spill that" and "no snacks before dinner" to your friends. But the main problem is money.  Many families can't afford to have one adult stay at home, even if that spouse does contract work or runs a side business. In up to 70 percent of families, both adults work outside the home.

So, here comes my pitch. (Drumroll please.) I propose that all employers offer on-site child care. It's the perfect solution: Parents would no longer obsess about FGC because their kids' caregivers would be in the same building.

Gone would be the frantic day-care runs and sick-kid days. The employer's child-care center could nurse sick children in a separate sick ward. And imagine the reduction in parents' guilt about working. They now could see their kids throughout the day. Heck, they could even have lunch with them.

But I know you're thinking this plan is whacked. So let me counter some of the obvious objections:

• Co-workers won't want annoying kids running the halls. Fair enough. But no worries because the kids would be in a separate area of the building. It could even be sound-proofed. And parents would have to visit them at the center, not the other way around.

• It would cost too much. Actually it could cost less, but it would likely take government backing in the form of incentives or subsidies to employers and cooperatives or exchanges. (I'm not saying government-run—for those worried about more rowdy townhall meetings.) Employers could also help fund it as a retention strategy—just like they do retirement and health benefits. And employees using it would pay into it.

• You can't have sick kids around healthy kids. You wouldn't. Sick kids would go straight to the sick ward, where they'd be nursed back to health. Meanwhile, mom and dad could be right around the corner to check on the kid and go to meetings.

Some companies are already doing on-site child care, without any external subsidies. They include AstraZeneca, Allstate, and Aflac, and I applaud them.

Seriously, workplace child care would have made all the difference to me over the past three years. Just this past week my husband and I took turns missing work when our three-year-old twins spiked fevers and puked repeatedly. Then daycare barred T-Rex from returning without a doctor's note because of an invisible rash and "swelling." (Personally, I just think they wanted a vacation.)

Stuff was blowing up at work the whole time that I had a toddler intermittently ralphing, spraying sugar all over the kitchen, and shooting hoops with a snow globe. Plus I worried I might be seen as playing the sick-kid card.

That's when I started dreaming about child care at work. And the more I thought about it, the more it made sense. Who's with me?

Umm, Actually, We DO Have All Day

07/16/2009

I had just thrown some leftovers into the office microwave and was waiting, impatiently drumming my fingers on the counter, when the front-page headline from The Onion caught my eye: “Everything Taking Too Long.”

“Dang straight!” I thought, relating to the accompanying photo—a guy clutching his head, eyes riveted to the chicken nuggets (or yams, hard to tell) taking forever to nuke in his microwave. Strange that the article was left next to the office nuker. Coincidence?

According to the article, a recent poll reveals that “54 percent of respondents are not getting any younger over here. Nearly 10 percent don't understand what the big holdup is. And 23 percent are not only ready, but have been ready for the past half hour, so let's go already.”

That really cracked me up. So did one man’s indignation that the subway train was running behind schedule, and another’s outraged refusal to wait at an emergency room. And that goober rolling his eyes at the microwave? Too funny. Then I realized, “Oh wait. That was me, three minutes ago.”

It got me to thinking: Pretty much all the examples of impatience in the article could be me. Take the train running behind schedule. Here in Washington, D.C., the metro route I ride, the Red Line, has been plagued by delays following an accident two weeks ago. You wouldn’t believe the amount of complaining this has caused. “The Red Line needs an exorcism,” I grouched on Facebook. A flurry of comments followed, with the theme: “Seriously, how long is this going to go ON?”

It’s kind of a disease—this massive rush we’re all in—and when I actually stop a moment and consider it, I’m not sure what the big hurry is. I reflect on an average work day:  It seems to take forever to get my three-year-old twins fed, dressed, and pottied. One of them, usually Punk, invariably has some sort of crisis right when I’m ready to step out the door. I turn around and he’s peed on the floor, saying “Uh OH!” Or he’s poured milk in his hair, stepped on a roll of crackers, or inexplicably tripped, fallen over backwards and hit his head on something or other.

“Punk,” I constantly find myself saying, “Come on! We don’t have all day.”

After that, I gun the car to daycare and back, then park and sprint to the metro, checking my BlackBerry to see how bad my meeting schedule is. I can feel my blood pressure mounting, and then I get stuck behind the clump of tourists. “Oh man, oh man—I will never get around these people!” I mutter like a grumpy old man.

The workday is more of the same: I open up email and instant messenger (IM) to a barrage of requests for things people needed yesterday. Ping! A meeting reminder pops up. Ring! A vendor wants to know where the check is. Ding! A colleague on IM needs an immediate answer to a question. Pop, pop, pop! My blood pressure cranks up a few more notches. Behind schedule by lunch, I tear down to the cafeteria, grab whatever’s being served to the shortest line, and race back to my desk to scarf it.

Now, finally, the irony is dawning on me. These technologies we’ve invented to free up more time are actually enslaving us; they’re making us jumpier than ever.  The train that speeds us to work is never on time. That search engine that should instantly “Bing” us results takes too long to load. And when the IM pings or the BlackBerry buzzes, we can’t respond fast enough.

A growing number of people have had enough of this technology-fueled rush. Proponents of the countervailing “Slow Movement,” like Carl Honoré, maintain that, in our increasing haste, we fail to experience life minute by minute. The more you become a “rushaholic,” they say, the more you try to cram into one day,  and the less well you do any of it; quality gets sacrificed for quantity. And, yes, the more a person multitasks, the harder it is for the brain to effectively do anything, studies by neuroscientists like Marcel Just of Carnegie Mellon University have repeatedly shown.

The mad rush can also bad for our health and relationships, possibly spurring anxiety, depression, and alienation from loved-ones, according to psychologists Michelle Weil and Larry Rosen, authors of the book TechnoStress. But don’t despair, they say. Here’s the good news: We control our lives and technology; we are only rushed to the degree that we let ourselves be rushed. We have the power to unplug, to turn off the beeps and buzzes of the e-mail and BlackBerry, to stay out of IM, to simply slow down.

Heck, looking at things this way, I’ve got no problem waiting for the train or microwave. Without feeling rushed, I can use the time to read, meditate, or just….sit.

So I’m going to try this slow thing. And I think I’m going to like it. Now, instead of riding the Red Line to work, I’m walking. It takes longer but I’m OK with that—very OK with that. Because after experiencing the exercise, the breeze in my face, and the trees and flowers along the way, I arrive at work relaxed, and ready for a slow, steady start to my day.