As of last week's post, I was feeling very optimistic. We'd had a great meeting with the new doctor, it felt like we had a treatment plan laid out, and we had a plan to alternate visits between the new doctor and the nurse practitioner so that we could have the benefit of both his expertise and her long-term connection with us. What could possibly go wrong?
Why do I even ask that question any more? Here is what is wrong, in a nutshell. It doesn't seem like our clinic has done a particularly good job, or maybe not any job at all, in terms of establishing the roles of the different providers and how they are meant to interact with each other. We have the director, the new doctor (who is sort of co-director and will become director when the current director retires) and the nurse practitioner (who mostly works with the current director and occasionally with the new co-director). So far so good, right?
Except, when I contacted the nurse practitioner to lay out what the new doctor had suggested to us, she said that she was not interested in doing the alternating visits idea and that in fact she had told the new co-director not to even offer that to patients as an option. She also said that in her opinion, the new treatment plan he proposed wasn't likely to help Lemon, but that we were welcome to try it if we wanted.
So, where does that leave us? We now have to decide if we are staying the course with the nurse practitioner (working with the current director) or jumping ship and getting care just from the new doctor. Obviously there are pros and cons to both paths. I haven't made a final decision yet, but am leaning towards switching to the new doctor. He is a relatively unknown quantity, but I had such a good feeling about him from our visit. And, I don't feel like the nurse practitioner and current director combo are really offering us a viable treatment plan to counter what the new doctor is proposing (plus, they're the ones who missed this issue when they could have caught it in June). On the other hand, I do really like the nurse practitioner and she has been working with us for a long time and knows us well.
It's a puzzle, but one I need to resolve soon so that we can stop standing still and actually do something to try to improve Lemon's situation. If I've learned one thing over the past 6.5 years, it's that nothing with CF is ever as straightforward as it should be!
