If there’s one thing that many women can collectively agree upon, it’s that visiting a gynecologist isn’t high on our list of favorite things. In fact, many would rather try to strike up a conversation with drying wallpaper than endure the doctor visits, though this is no fault of the practices we visit. There’s just really no way to make a pap smear the kind of procedure we’re ever going to long to experience.
However, it’s a part of life, and regularly visiting a gynecologist can help catch some pretty severe diseases — including, but not limited to cervical and ovarian cancer — so it’s not the kind of trip to the doctor’s office that should be skipped. One woman on TikTok is chronicling her experience with a gyno earlier this year, and it’s all just a bit spooky.
Olivia begins the video by telling her followers that this all started when she received a bill from the doctor she visited for a routine Pap smear; a few things on it caught her attention pretty quickly (like the charge per ounce of lubrication), but Olivia digressed; the more significant issue came from her trying to get in touch with the office and being unable to find a working number, website, or contact at all for a doctor she’d just been to a few months earlier.
Upon trying to contact the office a number of times, she decided to reach out to the overarching healthcare facility that the doctor worked under, and that’s when things got even stranger. A woman named Sydney told Olivia that the office didn’t exist — that’s right; Olivia heard the only thing that could make a gyno visit more uncomfortable: the idea that the office was totally imaginary.
Hear us out; the idea of a “ghost gyno” sounds kind of promising at first; no awkward conversations, visits that just sort of happen in some spooky realm. Heck — maybe they can play “Spooky Scary Skeletons” as the exam is happening, or have screens above the tables we have to lay on that play our favorite scenes from scary movies.
Alright, so maybe that’s our inner spooky season lover taking things a bit too far, but if you’ve never dreamt up ways to make that visit a little less… anything it is, we’d love to chat. The thing is, Olivia couldn’t have gone to a ghost gyno, because she drove to a doctor’s office, had an exam, got dressed, left, and waited on results; she notes that she never got a call with the results, but usually offices really only call if something is wrong. These days, tests that all look okay typically get sent to a my-chart to be viewed by the patient at their convenience.
Things only got more confusing when her healthcare network said they didn’t show that Olivia owed them anything. So the over $200 bill felt like further proof that she’d allegedly dreamt an entire day’s worth of events, but she wouldn’t stop there.
Could someone have been trying to send out fake bills to office patients? It certainly wouldn’t be the first time. Someone who works in billing urged Olivia to call her insurance company’s billing department, and to let them know what was happening.
Olivia called her insurance company, and they said she owed the money because the doctor was in the network, but the visit wasn’t covered. The key takeaway is that the doctor is real, but it’s still a bizarre situation; you might be able to write it off as nothing more than poor communication and billing errors, but there’s still a shady vibe surrounding the whole thing.
In an attempt to reach the office again, Olivia called a few more times, and the last time she called, the voiceover had changed. That’s right, the automated message she had memorized by that point was different, and a man was also reading it instead of a woman. If you’re scratching your head, you’re not alone.
All things considered, we feel confident in the idea that the office was, at least, once inhabited by a doctor’s office. While Olivia can’t know that right now (she’s not got a car at the moment, instead embracing her pedestrian era), we hope she can sleep a little easier after hearing that there’s a record of her visit.