Outpatient Blood Draw at Virginia Hospital Center

It’s been a long six weeks. We have been dealing with non threatening but very annoying health care issues. It’s been a lot of doctor visits, pharmacy fills, and testing but with no final diagnosis yet. A lot of things have been ruled out. But my husband has a personality that needs to know or he simply won’t rest - creating many sleepless nights. So now he needs to have an ultrasound - scheduled for this afternoon, and more blood work drawn this morning. He had a video visit with the doctor last night. Since there was a staffing issue at the clinic that is right across the street from where we live, we needed to go to the hospital for the lab draw. Thanks to the patient portal, we were able to schedule it on line and sign all the paperwork before we arrived. The hardest part was finding parking. I wanted to avoid the parking structure, so we found a space on the perimeter and used the park mobile app and scheduled an hour. Navigating the hospital is always interesting since we haven’t been there except for outpatient GI tests two weeks ago. Once in the lab area it was quite simple and well organized. If we ever need to go back we will at least know what we are doing. Since we haven’t really needed this much health care it’s also been an exercise trying to figure out what insurance covers. We are not looking forward to the bills that are piling up. All of the results have already been sent through the patient portal and luckily they look just fine. Hopefully things will be the same this afternoon. And for the first time my husband is hungry again - of course on the day he has to stay “nothing by mouth” until after the ultrasound. I don’t know what he will do if everything is negative. It’s been a very anxious time for both of us so we will deal with that when the time comes.