Good news bad news moment

So, I had my endo appointment today (delayed more than a month because of camp, but that’s another story) and most of my labs are good (except my vitamin d). My A1C is at 5.6, which is great, and I feel good. My endo complimented me, said I was doing good.

And then he told me he’s closing his practice. :insert shocked face:

This is the guy who diagnosed me in the hospital (well, I was in DKA, so it was kind of obvious what the problem was, but he’s the one who did the tests and confirmed T1) and came by at around 1am to tell me “You have type 1 diabetes. You will be on insulin for the rest of your life.” I must not have looked convinced, because he told me the same thing at least twice more (to his credit, I may not have heard it the first time, I was really out of it).

He didn’t leave me in the lurch. He faxed my records to another endocrinologist. But I’m going to miss him. He is willing to sign letters of medical intent (I wrote it, he signed and faxed it) and even though he was hesitant at first, he is willing to write the prescriptions I wanted. He is willing to talk over any questions I have (even when there’s a whole crowd of patients waiting) and didn’t push statins at me (my LDL is at 108–I’m not taking a statin drug that has a great chance of boxing my liver (my dad has liver problems directly related to cholesterol meds)) and didn’t mess with me when I told him what I was doing with my diabetes care.

Hopefully, my next endo is as enlightened. I’m going to see if my PCP will take over writing prescriptions, and take over the vitamin d thing.

I should probably at least meet her and see if we get along. After all, if something weirdly diabetic happened to me, I’d want to have an idea of whether I would trust this new endo. But it can wait a while.

Because I walked out of there with prescriptions for the next six months. :insert happy face:

Sorry to hear you are losing a doc but congratulations on a job well done! I don’t ever write letters for the doc. I (or BCBS…) are paying them a couple hundred bucks a pop!

Ah, but if I hadn’t, he would have sent my record (again) instead of typing something out, and thought that took care of my request for a letter of medical necessity. And (no offense to any people who have at any time in their lives worked for insurance agencies) I don’t think that a random person at BCBS actually can look at my medical file and tell that I really need test strips. They didn’t want to see that. They wanted to see something in one or two paragraphs that included the words “history of hypoglycemia” (which technically were in the record, but not in a readily accessable way).

My only real job has been a tech writer, so I’m used to having to write copy for gifted persons who have no idea of how to form thought so that the rest of the world can understand them. I’ve not worked for medical persons, but programmers are . . . a lot of them can’t translate tech-ease into English.

Not that I mind–it gives jobs to English majors who know how to form complete sentences, even when they don’t quite understand what they are saying . . .

I’m outlasting all my doctors, so welcome to the club.
Congratulations on your management of a rough situation.
Sounds like you did it all!
Maybe you need to post your letters so all we have to do is copy them!!!

Congrats on the great A1C. You must have worked very hard to have that number. Really sorry to hear your favorite Endo is leaving the practice. I’ve also experienced that and it does tend to make one feel rather sad.

Good Luck with the new Dr. and I hope things work out OK for you. Keep up the good work.