Life in the bottle makes me smile!

I am the Office Manager for a periodontist in Orlando. Many of our patients are elderly. It is not uncommon for one of the office staff to see the photo of one of our patients in the Obit section of the paper. We are all sad when one of them passes on. One patient in particular has been coming for appointments during the last year in a wheelchair. This patient is very incapacitated and physically frail. However, on her last routine visit, the dentist I work for discovered that she needed some surgical treatment. Her appointment was scheduled on a day that Dr. C was in one surgery after another. On those kind of days, the schedule can get backed up, because surgery time can be estimated, but the length of necessary time can't be planned out to the minute perfectly. When this elderly patient arrived for her appointment, Dr. C was running behind in the previous surgery. We had another patient arrive for a short observation appointment for a check of healing in a surgical site. This patient tends to be very grouchy when left waiting in the reception area too long. Given the dynamics of those two patients in the reception area, I went to check with one of our assistants about Dr. C's progress on the surgery in the operatory suite. About this time I was feeling a bit of panic. I said to the assistant, "How much longer is Dr. C going to be? Mr. F doesn't like to wait to be seen. Ms. M has also arrived, and I don't think she will last too long." Our assistant, without missing a beat and totally deadpan, said, "My, you are sure full of optimism today." At that quip, I realized how my inquiry had come across...fortunately, Dr. C wasn't delayed very much longer. Both patients were seen in a timely fashion. We didn't lose our patient, and she only bit the doctor once!