I posted about this on another group, but figured it was a relevant addition to my thread here. While I hope this doesn't happen to future Schechter patients, I think it's worth putting it out there so that folks know it has happened at least once.
Tl;dr - I keep getting disappointed by Dr. Schechter's office, who has yet to schedule me for surgery after months of being ready and waiting. Still no surgery date. I scheduled a consult with another surgeon and am considering going to someone else.
To recap, I consulted with Dr. Schechter at the end of February. I asked during my consult if summer would be doable for surgery, and was told yes. It took about 3 weeks after that for my insurance to approve the procedure. Shortly after that, I got my first surgery date. And it was subsequently cancelled. This process repeated 2 more times. I've had a total of 3 dates, all of which were cancelled shortly after being scheduled.
Around mid-May, I reached out to Dr. Schechter directly to confirm what exactly we were looking at in terms of dates, and was told late August or September. Not what I wanted to hear, but fine. I got an e-mail from his office coordinator about a month ago, saying that she would be in touch in July to get me scheduled. She did get in touch last week, and asked if I was ready to pay the balance of my portion for the procedure. I assumed this meant that they had a date lined up, so I asked when I'd be having surgery.
Apparently she didn't remember cancelling my last surgery date and that's what she had wanted me to pay for. I told her I wasn't keen on paying any more toward my balance until I had a date, and was 2 weeks out from that date because of all these cancellations. She asked me to reconfirm what date range I was looking at, and I reiterated what Dr. Schechter and I had previously discussed about late August or September if there wasn't an earlier option. I could hear her scrolling over the phone and after a few seconds she finally goes, "Hmm well we're booked up for both of those months. It looks like the earliest we might have is October."
It took me a few hours to get over how ridiculously angry I was. After I did, I emailed Dr. Schechter and, as politely as possible, went through the timeline as I did above, reminded him all the dates we had discussed at various points in this process, and questioned why guys who had consulted after me, whose insurance had approved after mine, and who were at the same stage of readiness as me, had had surgery already this year, during the periods that I had wanted to have surgery.
Unfortunately I didn't get any kind of answer. He said they are still looking at dates and coordinating with the urologist that he works with. He didn't give me any kind of timeline or date range this time, just that they would "be in touch ASAP" with a date. This was exactly the kind of headache that I wanted to avoid by not going to Dr. Crane. It has taken every ounce of willpower in me not to call and ask to have my pre-payment refunded.
I'm still pretty upset about it. I've done everything possible to breeze through this process. I decided the day after that I wasn't going to wait for them to get in touch again, only to find out that there are no dates available until winter or later. So I got in touch with Dr. Bluebond-Langner's office in Maryland and scheduled a consult. She can't get me in until the beginning of October, but it doesn't seem like I'll be getting in with Dr. Schechter before then, so there's no harm in it.
There are a lot of pros to potentially going to her for surgery. She's about an hour away from my house, so travel costs would be minimal and lodging expenses would be non-existent. I have lots of local resources in place, all of whom highly recommend her. And my out of pocket expenses with insurance would be at least $3k less. The only con that I can see is that she is significantly less experienced. I've asked my doctor for copies of my referrals. Once I get those, I'll be asking if Dr. BL's office can add me to the cancellation list so I can potentially get in earlier.
I'm not excited about potentially having to restart this whole surgical process, but I'm really disappointed in the experience I've had thus far with Dr. Schechter's office. At first I thought it was just an issue of scaling up his capacity to meet the increased demands now that his name is more out there, but the fact that I've been passed over at least 3 times that I know of really makes me question what the hell is going on.
Feel free to leave feedback and thoughts. Every time I write this out, I get more angry about it and think about cancelling with him altogether. I want to give them the opportunity to do the right thing, but it seems pretty bleak at this point.
