My Chronic Illness Dream

Chronic Mom wrote an amazing post about Why People Don’t Care About the Chronically Ill, then she wrote this great follow-up post. As I read it I saw this one section and it resounded with me as something that I’ve dreamed. If I could ask for just one thing to change about my chronic illness, this would be it.

“One place to start would be better healthcare for the chronically ill. Instead of making patients schlep from doctor to doctor (none of which communicate with each other) for problems in different parts of their body, it should be possible to have a coordinated healthcare team.” – Chronic Mom

This is my chronic illness dream. If I were to write my “I have a dream…” speech, this would be it.

If I could have anything right now related to my health it would be a healthcare TEAM!

I get so frustrated with going from doctor to doctor explaining and re-explaining my symptoms. One doctor just shoving my issues off onto the other, and another just ignoring them altogether. How are we ever supposed to get any answers this way?

I read stories of people who have gone to the Mayo Clinic or one of the other major hospitals where they have a team examine you from top to bottom and (hopefully) give you some real answers and I’m so jealous of those people.

Hell, I’d be happy if I just had one decent GP that would coordinate with all my other doctors, one doctor that knew what was going on with me. The problem is that when you have 10 doctors each doing their own thing and never looking at what others are doing you end up with extra costs for repeated tests, and often still missing important things that should be looked at because they assume someone else has it covered.

I think this is a large part of what drives me to doctor hop, I keep hoping that eventually I’ll find a GP that cares enough to really follow my healthcare journey and not just react to whatever I walk in with on that one day (if they even do that).

You’d think this would be something that the insurance companies would be pushing for because it would decrease the cost of healthcare overall. So, how do we make this happen? Have you managed to make this happen? If so, please do share?