Thread: the dog ate my lab results?

I'm looking for ideas for medical "technical difficulties" that might prevent a patient from learning results of important lab-work.

The project i'm working on has a secondary character who has been diagnosed with cervical carcinoma in situ (pre-cancer cells in the cervix). One scene has her going in for a biopsy procedure - then in another scene, roughly two weeks later, she makes an ecstatic phone call to the main character with news that her margins were clean (the cells had not spread to other organs, which would require more aggressive cancer treatments).

However, I'm given to understand that two weeks is a wee bit long to wait for news like that. Unfortunately, I can't alter the timeline of events because the scenes are pretty tightly woven. It would be far easier to write in an excuse for why it took longer than normal, such as a gaff at the lab. Plus the longer wait could add to the characters' tension.

Any suggestions for a reasonable-sounding lab delay?

Um.... not with the situation as you have described it. Oncologists, as you may imagine, work within a pretty tight schedule. When a biopsy is done, a lot of the time they run the slide down to the lab while the patient is still knocked out and get the result within a few minutes--because the patient is lying there sedated, and if that person indeed has cancer, why waste a good opportunity to cut?

If your character was indigent or poverty-stricken and had the biopsy done as an outpatient procedure, there is a chance that the results might take some time to reach her, but of course someone who's worried about a cancer diagnosis isn't going to just sit patiently for two weeks waiting for someone to call; she's gonna call and call and call and ask if her results are in. If the results were lost or mixed up with someone else's results the error would be discovered within a few days, not a couple of weeks.

But it doesn't sound like your character is indigent, so that's out.

If the character's friend was somehow out of the loop for all that time--like lost in the woods, stranded on a desert island, indigent him/herself etc.--then that might provide an out for you and you might not have to re-write the entire story.

And finally, you could try re-setting your story in someplace that has socialized medicine like Russia, where the character is going to have to wait six months to get the biopsy in the first place, and where the results are likely to be botched, unreadable, or "lost" until your character generously greases a few palms.

I know this probably sounds sort of flip and not very helpful. If it's any consolation, I totally understand your pain here, as I'm in the midst of making painstaking line-by-line corrections to an MS I started years ago--good story, BAD errors on locations and time lines that require multiple fixes across a 175,000-word novel and several stories.

Ugh! But I'm not going to abandon my story in spite of its flaws, and I hope you don't either.

Please feel free to message me if you need any more medical info, as I've worked in the health care industry for most of my adult life--so that's like..... about 700 or so years now. (And no, I'm not a doctor; I just play one on TV!!!)

if your story is compelling enough, it should not be a problem at all.

You could try blaming it on an insurance mix-up. For example, the insurance company didn't think the test was necessary and tried to deny coverage, forcing your character to call in and chew out the insurance rep and make them approve the test.

Realistically, it could take a few days to discover that the insurance company had done something stupid, and then a few more to convince them that the test was necessary.

As Scarlett points out, though, the doctors wouldn't just sit on something like that, so your character might have to take a weekend holiday and forget her cell phone or something to create the time gap necessary to explain the delay.

Good luck!

-Joe

I'm a bit foggy on the details after many years, but I once had a chest x-ray that was inconclusive, and some days later, after the system got around to me, I was called back for another one. What should have taken just a few days for me to be given the all-clear finished up more like a fortnight. All because of a smudge on the film or some such. Inconclusive was the key word with me; could that also be the case for your character?

Don't feel bound by the usual procedures. If the lab results are not on paper yet, computer issues could delay them. If something out of the ordinary were to occur at the hospital it could cause the delay. In the event of the death or unexpected absence of someone at the lab, there could arise some confusion and results could be lost or not delivered. A large amount of patients coming in could just over burden the lab, like if there's some flu or fever going, there's new epidemics all the time. and finally, doctors aren't perfect. There's always the "oops" factor

I walked around with a broken hand and index finger for a week when I was 8 years old because of an xray mix up. Doctors and Technicians are people with flaws.