By Marianna Boyce
MyChart at Lexington Medical Center is an online tool that connects your personal health records from various doctors. It allows fluid communication with your LMC healthcare team, enables easy access to test results, manages appointments and prescription requests, etc. If you haven’t set up your chart, you may want to consider doing so if you see doctors within this network.
My healthcare team at LMC includes only a primary care physician and rheumatologist. My gynecologist, on the other hand, has worked at South Carolina OBGYN located at Prisma Health Baptist in Columbia for many years. I never had plans to change that, but always wished he was included on MyChart in Lexington.
My phone buzzed one afternoon a couple of weeks ago. The number looked familiar, but I couldn’t place who it was. I skeptically answered anyway. It was a recorded reminder from South Carolina OBGYN about an upcoming appointment. I listened to the recording a second time for clarity because I could hardly believe my ears. I smiled with delight as the robot-sounding voice on the other end of the line shared not only the date and time of my appointment but also that SC OBGYN had moved to a new location. You’ll never guess where.
Their new address is Lexington Medical Park 1 on Sunset Blvd. I was elated! What are the chances? But more importantly, why dedicate an entire blog post about it?
Up until only a few years ago, I considered my OB doc my primary care physician (PCP). Having never experienced any health-related issues, Dr. Holladay was the only doctor I needed to see—until the summer of 2016.
When I went for my annual checkup that summer day, I shared that something was terribly wrong inside my body. The pain I experienced was the worst I’d felt in my entire life. It was far too great for me to handle on my own. My presumption was bone cancer—a horrible thought, having just arrived home from an exhilarating road trip across the United States of America. I recently wrote a summer road trip series for Every Woman Blog about this very trip when I was 100% healthy.
The pain struck quickly, morphing me into a completely different person within fourteen days of arriving home. My appointment with Dr. Holladay was at this fourteen-day benchmark. I was completely miserable.
My symptoms were not in Dr. Holladay’s area of expertise, but I confided in him anyway. He was my only doctor, my friend, and my confidant. He didn’t shrug off my concerns as symptoms of getting older, nor did he make me feel it was all in my head or even weight-related. He was exactly the type of doctor I needed for the emergence of my daunting new journey.
After pouring my heart out about the unfortunate chain of events, he immediately sent me down the hall for a complete blood panel to check for anything unusual. He suggested I make an appointment with a primary care physician so he could forward the results of my bloodwork as soon as possible. These tests revealed nothing unusual, to begin with, but this jump-started what would ultimately be a desperate search for an elusive diagnosis.
He put the wheels in motion in 2016, and now that he’s here with me at Lexington Medical Center, MyChart is now complete. I’m sure the aging process will add additional doctors in the future, but as for now, I’m completely satisfied with the three fabulous doctors that I currently have.
A weight update is looming, but that’ll be a blog post all in itself—Ugh! I’ll “weight” and discuss that after the holidays—you’re welcome! Until then, enjoy your time with family, friends, and loved ones. Remember to be thankful all year-round, but for this special time of year—Happy Thanksgiving everyone!