Monday 23 December 2013

That time I nearly punched an audiologist

Firstly maybe I should take a step back from the title before people start thinking I'm a psychopath. As I've commented before on this blog I haven't had the best of experiences when dealing with the audiology department at the hospital.  Have had problems with them being rude, not telling us information and just generally being very unhelpful. The other week we had to go back once again in the hope they would be able to add a program or change a setting or whatever on my digital hearing aid, to allow me to listen to my mp3 player without all the normal noise picked up by the hearing aid itself. It should be noted that at the previous appointment the guy said no sorry we can't do anything (remember this point). After a while of being frustrated with not being able to listen to music on the train without having to crank my mp3 player up I decided to email the company who makes the hearing aid and the receiver and they said they weren't sure but it may be possible to have a mic only program. Ok so that's fine decided to email the female audiologist who's work email she had given me (i.e. not the one who we had the last appointment with who is a guy). We emailed back and forth eventually she said yes we could try it and scheduled an appointment for me.

Ok so that's the set up to the story. It should be noted that before the appointment with the audiologist I had an appointment with the dentist where I had to get a filling and a tooth resealed, not actually the most pleasant of things so I wasn't in the best of moods. Got up to the audiology department, turns out its the same guy as before. Sit down and he starts going on about getting my mic system repaired and me and my mum were like "no we never said anything about any repairs" to which he replied "yes you did and Lorraine (the female audiologist who I had emailed) has mentioned it in her email to me". So this was the first problem since neither me nor my mum had said anything about my microphone system needing repaired at any appointment or in any email and it was rather frustrating that he basically implied that we were lying. It got even worse as when we got to actually talking about what we did  want he had the nerve to say that he had never said we couldn't have this setting (remember what I said before about how he had said exactly that). So there was a bit of back and forth and again he basically implied that we were lying and he had never said such a thing. Finally he got around to trying to adjust it, managed to suprise surprise actually get it to do what I wanted it to and then made a big deal about how it was hard to do even though it just required him to make  new setting with the microphone system and deselect the microphone option. So in the end we finally got sorted but the point of the title is that despite the fact I'm not a violent person the experience of dealing with the department and with this idiot gave me the urge to punch him in the face and hospital appointments should really not make you violent. Contrast this with the experience of the dentist appointment before hand which despite the unpleasantness of the treatment couldn't have been better in terms of the staff. The dentist actually told us that they train the students/staff in how they deal with patients and it makes you think that this should apply to all departments major and minor.

How it might've looked....