I’ve been seeing opthamologists for many years now. I get a dilated eye exam and now an optical coherence tomography scan has been added to each appointment. I’m usually done in 60-90 minutes total and don’t spend more than 10-15 minutes waiting. Maybe it’s a New York thing or simply the doctor you’re seeing.
My current retina doc is part of a one of those private equity owned practices so they are trying o maximize patients per day. I think they’ve got the whole waiting/dilating/exam down to 30 minutes. Appointments were longer, then they went through a year of getting shorter until one appointment the doc asked if they’d even done the drops and I had to go back to the waiting room for 10 more minutes. I think another factor is some drops that work faster than others,
Just another of the “joys” diabetes brings to our lives.
You have not lived through Ophthalmology hell until being seen by the Beetham Eye Institute at Joslin in Boston. Technically, they are great, but count it a win if you can have your exam done in less than 2 1/2 hours, let alone deal with lost records, be forgotten in the dilation area, one person taking you for the digital images, only to have another person come a little later to do them again. They are the most disorganized, poorly run eye clinic I have encountered anywhere in the world. Since I see my endo upstairs from the eye clinic, I put up with their nonsense, but no your New York experience sounds pretty good to me. BTW my longest wait time once exceeded 8 hours due to “emergency patients” that had to be fed in during my visit and a host of other excuses.
I’ve been with the same opthamologist for almost 20 years now and his practice is like an assembly line. Intake, review, dilating drops, sometimes some scans (my favorite is the one that I call “Battle Zone” like the old video game, nobody at the office ever gets the reference), a little bit of wait for dilating drops to kick in, slit-lamp eye exam, and I have been back out on the street in as little as a half hour (although an hour is more typical). Very very occasionally I’ll get a carrot-juice injection and fluroescence photo but still I have never been in that office for more than 2 hours.
Your last sentence, let me do the math: Opthamologist visits every six months for 43 years. That’s 86 visits. Although my current endo is very efficient, for sure some take 2 hours or more. That could be between 4 and 7 days of my life depending on whether it’s 1-hour or 2-hour visits.
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