Humbling

At the clinic, I have become quite frustrated with patients that come in just for a pregnancy test.  You can buy the $4 stick to pee on in the comfort of your own home instead of coming to the urgent care, paying the $15 copay, and then charging Medicaid for the visit and "lab" test and provider fee. So we tax payers are funding the urgent care visit for a completely unnecessary test.  I take this personally and can go off ranting about the US administration of Medicaid for a long time.  But in this instance, I asked the patient if she took a home pregnancy test and she said that yes, it was negative.  I left the room (with a very fake smile because half of health care is customer service) to check the results from the lab and it was positive!  It questioned my confidence in the specificity and sensitivity of home pregnancy tests.  I freaked out that I may be pregnant even though my April Fools day home preg test said negative :)  Yes, I assume there was user error in the patient's administration of the home pregnancy test, but still I am reminded that not all tests are accurate.  Humbled, my rantings on unnecessary urgent care visits that I, as a tax payer, end up paying for, were subdued that day.