Are you ------- kidding me?

When my husband and I were making arrangements to move in July it included more than just finding an apartment, figuring out how to get our cats and car across the country, and finding a moving company. Since we were in the process of infertility treatments, and had stopped doing treatments when I got hired, we would need to find a new fertility clinic to go to after moving. Luckily (or unluckily, it now seems) there is only one clinic in the new province, so we didn’t need to do much research, we just needed to contact our current clinic and ask them for a referral.

As soon as I knew what day I would be moving I called the current clinic to request a referral to the new clinic. The patient care coordinator said it would take her a few days to get the referral and our file together, and that she would email me to let me know when it was sent to the new clinic. A few days later she called to confirm that I wanted everything sent to the new clinic, and then faxed it over. She told me to wait about a week and if I hadn’t heard anything to follow up with the new clinic. I called them just after I moved (August 3), which was over a week after the files were faxed. The new clinic had not received my files. I emailed the old clinic and asked for them to be sent again. The care coordinator was on vacation so it was about 10 days before they were faxed over again. Another week had passed and we hadn’t heard anything from the new clinic so my husband called them to confirm they got the files. They have not received them – TWO faxes and they still don’t have our referral.

My husband knows how stressful and upsetting and frustrating this all is to me, so he called our old clinic to confirm that everything was sent, and whoever he talked to (not the person I’ve been dealing with) told him that the do not ever refer patients elsewhere, which seems like absolute BS because people get transferred for work or have to move closer to their family all the time, so they will need to switch clinics and should be able to get their current RE to refer them to a new RE so that they don’t need to go through booking an appointment with a family doctor or OBGYN, repeat testing unnecessarily (especially painful and invasive testing like an HSG), and having to add all that additional time on to the already long wait time to get in to see the new RE.

I contacted the patient care coordinator and asked her to fax the files again. I also asked if we could have them sent any other way. At this point I’d pay any sort of courier charge to mail them, pay for a “general appointment” with the RE to have her phone the new one, or even have the referral and chart sent to me so I could march in to the new office, give them the files and tell them to check that their damn fax machine is working.

I’ve mentioned previously that it’s a 7 month wait for an initial consultation appointment, and up to another 5 months to get on to an IVF cycle. We’ve just added ANOTHER MONTH on to the wait time because the new clinic can’t get our referral.