If you got this voicemail from the doctor's office, after doing blood work, what would you think?

I would first wonder if one of the samples was insufficient and needed to be redrawn before the appointment.

I wouldn’t expect bad results by phone call when I had an appointment scheduled within a week, especially if they said “nothing urgent” in the voicemail.

I have access to my lab results through my electronic medical record, so I would probably log into that before I called the nurse back.

I would also assume that “Nothing urgent” meant nothing urgent. I have gotten the call about biopsy results, and they said “Please get back to us as soon as possible, we need to set up an immediate appointment for discussion.”
I assumed from that that the results were pretty dire. I was correct.

They said Nothing urgent so I would think that it was minor.

I guess, to explain better, that I felt if it was minor, it would have been able to wait until my appointment with the doctor, which was (is) four business days away.

I would just have taken them at their word.

Sometimes I think medical professionals are clueless to the patient. My hubby had a minor surgery the other day. When they went to put the IV in, the person doing it was asking the other person what arm to put it in and where. I told them “You guys aren’t soliciting a lot of confidence. Is this your first day?”
I think because they deal with this stuff every day they don’t realize that surgery and anesthesia are a major life event to the person on the gurney and although it’s routine to them, the patient and their family are hyper focused!
I worked in the medical profession (years ago) and realized that a lot of people there are task and detail oriented. That is important for safety I guess but to have a person with those skills who is also skilled in relationship building is a rare breed.

I would not have been bothered, “nothing urgent” means well…nothing urgent. What can cause someone to react like that is anxiety and stress from other things. Stressed lately?

As others have correctly said, the “nothing urgent” should’ve eased any concerns from the get go.

“Nothing urgent” means no cancer, no diabetes, no AIDS, no small pox, no brain tumor. It could mean, however, Hemophilia, Hepatitis A, B, C and D, but not E. Also, it could mean Abdominal Aortic Aneurysm,Alpha 1 Antitrypsin Deficiency, Acquired Epileptic Aphasia, or…oh hell. Here is the whole list of things that “not urgent” could really mean.

@Judi people drawing blood from me often ask which arm or area usually gives them the best results. That way there is less chance of having to repeat the stabbing on the hunt for a good vein.

He wasn’t asking us, he was asking his co worker. Turns out he was called in from another department because they were short handed. Our post OP nurse was also inexperienced in surgery. She was called in from a medical floor.

I think the staff member was being tactful and appropriate, keeping the message vague and not leaving any confidential information. That person had no idea who might listen to your home voicemail; it could have been any member of your household, including a roommate, spouse, or child. Even mentioning “your levels” would have been indiscreet.

If it had been me, I would have relied on the “nothing urgent” comment and not worried about a scary outcome.

@ARE_you_kidding_me: No, I’m not stressed from anything else. The two reasons I got anxious when hearing the voicemail, as I stated, were that I knew that I’d be seeing the doctor in only four business days, so if it really weren’t urgent he would tell me at that visit, and also I knew there were only a few things they were testing with my blood, so what results could they have found from them? Very few. TSH (which is thyroid), glucose (hence my concern about diabetes) and vitamin levels.

Sometimes I do think medical folks can be thoughtless or tactless or just plain clueless. Once after doing my husband’s chest X-ray, the technician freaked my husband out by saying “Good luck.” He stewed about it for days, until he saw his doctor. Nothing was wrong; the tech probably had no idea that it might have made the patient wonder why he needed good luck.

Years ago, as I was waiting to see a doctor and get the results of my first pregnancy test, the nurse stuck her head into the waiting room and said, “I don’t know if this is good news or not, but you’re pregnant.” As it happened, it was good news, but that was not how I wanted to receive it, and it would have been even less appropriate if the news had been unwelcome. Either way, it was none of the business of the four other people in the room. I complained to the doctor.

But most of the time I do think that regardless of how busy they are, the health care people I see behave professionally and remember not to garble the words they’re saying for the 4000th time, when the recipient has never heard them before.

I do think the way your message was left could have been a little bit more sensitive, but I’m glad there wasn’t actually any bad news for you. What would have worried me is if the message had said, “The doctor wants you to come in right away to discuss your results.”

As I read through your details I was surprised you jumped to diabetes or cancer. Nothing urgent to me means it isn’t going to be anything urgent. I would assume something might be slightly elevated or deficient and a change in meds might be necessary, or a repeat test.

I would never assume a nurse knew that I had an appointment coming up, even if the information was right in front of their face. There can be a sign on a door at eye level that says pull and one person after another will try to push it.

They can’t give you any information about the test results over the phone, so they can’t say anything like “Nothing major.” They did, however, say “Nothing urgent,” which could potentially be interpreted in the same way. In my opinion, even that was going a bit far.

I don’t think it’s fair to be upset with the caller for not giving more information than they are allowed to. I think you overreacted by assuming your results must be “bad” if they wanted to discuss them with you. That’s not rational. There could have been many reasons that they needed to have a conversation following the tests.

I think in your position, I just would be happy there was nothing wrong.

They give me test information over the phone all the time, @dappled_leaves.

One was, as I said above, a spot they’d removed from my nose was cancerous.

Once they gave me cholesterol tests. Nurse called to tell me that the numbers were out of this world. She’d never seen numbers so good. Dr. told me the same thing a few days later…he’d never seen such great numbers.

I usually go online and see my results before I even talk to anyone at the doctors office.