Contacting Your Doc in an Emergency

[Guest guest]

I just read part of the thread about how hard it is to get ahold of a

doc at Mt. Sinai, and I am APPALLED!

ly, I expect a doctor's office staff to be worthless in an

emergency. But doen't Mt. Sinai have any way of bypassing the office

and going direct to the doc when you really need to?

For example, I expect very little from the office staff at USC, and

I'm rarely either disappointed or surprised. But when I need to talk

to Dr. Anthone pronto, I just call the 800# and have him paged.

For example, two weeks ago, I had horrible constipation with

dehydration, so I called the 800# on Sunday night. Dr. Anthone

called me back in about 2 minutes, from his dining room table, where

he was entertaining guests. He listened carefully to my description

of the problems, and then instructed me to get to an ER ASAP. Plus,

he said he wanted the ER to run complete blood and urine panels, and

that they were to call him as soon as they got the results. He

finally got that call at about 1:00 a.m. Luckily (for somebody) he

wasn't operating the next day! He " only " had his usual 7:30 a.m.

rounds followed by his typical 10 hours of monday clinic appointments

(with pre and post-ops), followed by afternoon rounds.

Okay, enough crowing about my doc who, in case you didn't notice, I

happen to think rather highly of. << >>

The point is, I think it's reprehensible that any of our surgeons

would not make certain that a qualified surgeon was on call 24/7 to

field the important calls.

And my question is, do a lot of you have this problem?

Tom