To anyone looking for a top surgeon in Seattle: please please avoid Alexandra Schmidek at Virginia Mason.
I’m going to start with the biggest one: She wouldn’t let me ask any questions about the surgery until I booked the pre-op appointment AND the surgery. I’m going to say that again: She wouldn’t answer any of my questions until I scheduled the actual surgery.
They require you to have all your letters in before scheduling an appointment which I thought was normal. After I decided to go get two more consultations with two other surgeons, I found out it definitely wasn’t. This dragged out the process by a few weeks, and then once they FINALLY got the paperwork processed they accidentally shredded them. It was ridiculous and obviously dragged it out another two weeks.
She would not explain why I couldn’t get keyhole. I was already 100% prepared to get double incision since I was pretty sure I didn’t qualify for keyhole, but I still wanted the surgeon themself to explain why. I also only found a few results/reviews online and it seems she makes everyone get DI without explaining it properly. Once I saw the surgeon I’ve decided to go to now, he explained exactly why I could get it but why people choose not to. Her lack of ability to explain why keyhole wasn’t an option (it was) really speaks to how much she knows of top surgery in general, in my opinion.
The office staff are extremely rude to the point that the last time I called them, one of them mocked me. Genuinely repeated the sentence I said to her back in a high pitched voice. She also wouldn’t let me say more than three or four words before she would yell over me. I’m honestly still a bit in shock from being yelled at on the phone by someone who works at the hospital I almost went to.
They told me that I was approved for surgery by my insurance so they helped me pick out my date for me. I called them yesterday to have them transfer over the approval paperwork to my other surgeon so I wouldn’t have to start the process over and they told me they had no record of my insurance being approved or the surgeon signing a pre-authorization form. They were going to give me surgery before my insurance went through while directly lying to me that it had been.
The surgeon whose consultation I went to after deciding against her explained the surgery so thoroughly in the first appointment he answered 11/14 of the questions on my list before I even asked them. Both the surgeons I scheduled consultations with after her recommended I bring the letter to the first appointment, but afterwards was fine as to not slow down the process of first seeing the surgeon. They also provided the paperwork I could sign for them to contact my medical professionals directly to get the letters for me. At Virginia Mason, you had to get the letters yourself before you can schedule anything. The reason this doesn’t work well is because the consultation is basically an interview to see if you like the surgeon or not.
The most malicious thing I felt at Virginia Mason was that their system is set up to make you feel like they are your only choice. By not letting me get a consultation until I had the letters (which they have very specific guidelines for) and then not answering any questions until the pre-op, which you have to schedule within a month of surgery, I ended up feeling trapped into getting surgery with her because I’d already invested so much of my time.
I wanted surgery so bad I refused to see all the red flags until it was almost too late, which made me waste another 8 months. I also have found barely anything online about her (even the surgeon I’m going to go to now hasn’t heard of her) and I wanted at least post this review so people will know to avoid her.
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