Live in a COVID-19 Hot Spot: Week 11 – Testing Online “House Calls”
Week 11, and we have a medical problem in our home. My husband’s arthritis (we think) has flared into a brushfire, he can’t walk or stand without a cane, and even then not for more than a few minutes. Last night he tripped over a rug and fell, and it was several scary minutes before he was able, with my help, to struggle into a chair.
He had called a doctor two days before, but the closest appointment available, in an on-line video conference, was Tuesday mid-afternoon. My husband is something of a Luddite when it comes to modern technology, so we were a bit apprehensive about going on-line with the doctor. Tuesday morning we got a call from the doctor’s office: Could we move the video conference up to 12:20? They would send a new link via email.
As of 12:05 the new link had not arrived. And then our internet connection went down.
Backup, of course, was my husband’s new smartphone, grudgingly bought a few months ago because he was tired of having to call me for GPS information. I decided that maybe the old link for the mid-afternoon appointment would still work. I started working on that, while my husband used our landline to contact the doctor’s office. After 5 minutes on hold, he got through, as I was still trying to decipher the difference between “username” and “password” on my husband’s cheat sheet of access codes.
Turns out the office had forgotten to send out the new link. My husband had an old-fashioned phone conversation with the doctor, ending with the decision that yes, husband had better come in for an even older-fashioned office visit in another two days.
At this rate of “progress”, we may find the doctor making house calls in person!
Allyson Johnson 