I don't normally do this, but after this afternoon, well, I'm sorry…read more
Today was one of the two worst medical experiences I've ever had in my life.
Dr. Sein appeared incapable of focusing, and I don't know if she thought I was hard of hearing or what, but she was shouting the entire time. Not angry, worse - like she was constantly trying to be heard over a loud sound system.
She rushed in like she had somewhere else to be, and remained in that state for the entire appointment.
She never introduced herself or even once called me by my name; instead, she addressed me as "hon" the entire time. In fact, she called me "hon" every other sentence and it was clear she hadn't even bothered to skim my file to learn my name.
She came off as distracted and unfocused, even hyperactive, and that alone felt incredibly stressful and unprofessional, but the mistakes she made right at the onset made the frustration of the experience worse.
She got the wrong eye at first, then insisted several times that the floater I'd come in for was in my right eye before finally actually slowing down just enough to check my information and saying, "Oh, you may be right." "May"...? Like, I think I know which eye the problem is in?
She would rapid-fire questions at me only to interrupt my answers with more rapid-fire questions, always with "Hon." I'm not old, I'm not hard of hearing, and I don't normally speak slowly, but I had to keep pausing and then repeating my responses slower and more quietly each time because she wasn't even listening to them, she was just talking over me.
I couldn't even get her to be present enough to ask her the questions I had come in with and she never asked if I had any, anyway. At one point during this ordeal, she offhandedly mentioned that oh, by the way, there's a cataract beginning to form in one of my eyes but not to worry about it and then rushed on to the next topic, which is, to put it lightly, a shockingly awful way to break that news.
There is no way I feel safe trusting my eyesight to this person or feel safe in her operating room. Because of this experience, I can't even trust her judgement on her referral to a second specialist and I left a message with my primary eye doctor to ask for a second opinion on the other doctor and perhaps get a different referral.
Speaking of:
The "referral" to the next eye surgeon I was given was a quickly printed half page of a Google review of him. That was it. The whole thing was slapdash, sloppy. No receptionist met with me at the desk to go over anything like professional staff do, they just thrust the printout of the Google review into my hands and told me to call the guy.
Look, I get it - it's a Friday afternoon, people are already mentally checked out, they want to go start their weekend or whatever but speaking as a patient, the last place you want that happening at is an eye doctor's office.
I let my primary eye doctor know there's no way I'm going back to this place, ever. And that's not even getting to the fact that I was in the waiting room for an hour and a half before I even saw her. There weren't many patients there, the place was simply disorganized.
Staff:
Pre-dilation, an assistant took me to check my vision with the eye chart. When I said I still had my contacts in, they just shrugged at me and insisted I read the chart with them still in, which isn't how vision is supposed to be checked. The flimsy plastic handheld tool that covers each eye to read the eye chart was cheap and falling apart - a piece slipped out of its position a few times - and they had me use it instead of them using quality tools in a professional manner. Even if the eye check had been done by competent professionals, I had sweat from the heat stinging and clouding my eyes under my contacts. When I asked for eye drops to at least maybe clear up some of the clouding so I could see the chart a bit better, the assistant said they didn't have any (in an eye doctor's office?) then went in search of some saline solution.
Post-dilation, an assistant took me back to get images of my eyes on an unfamiliar machine. While I was trying to get the right alignment for my nose, she got impatient and physically pushed the back of my head to force my face against the machine, then kept pushing my head around until she got my face into the position she wanted.
Really didn't like the personal boundary violating nor the discomfort.
Judging by the chatbot-sounding responses to its other one-star Yelp reviews, I expect that any response from the team to this is also going to be written by AI but I hope that somewhere along the line an actual human reads it.
All of this communicates to me that this office just does not care and I emphatically advise avoiding this place. As patients, placing our trust in a doctor and their team is a serious thing. The least a professional can do is take that seriously.
Anna
