Doctors - if driving pregnant women crazy is your goal, follow the steps below:

1. Suggest to a mom-to-be that because she is older (34 - the horror!), she should have a test (quad screen) which an incredibly high number of false positives. Ninety percent of all babies who show an abnormality on this screening test will be born healthy, according to some articles.

2. Call her days before her results are supposed to arrive to let her know that you have them already and they show that her baby is at an increased risk of spina bifida. Give her as little info as possible - you don't want to alarm her, and you figure she won't look any of this up on the Internet or anything, right? Send her back for a second test, stat!

3. When she calls the next day to get more info, have the nurse tell her that her second test results are in, and that you will call her later today to answer her questions and give her the new results.

4. Don't call.

5. When mom-to-be calls the next morning, have your staff tell her that you have the day off. Make sure no other doctor will be in until late in the afternoon.

6. When mom calls back to say that she wants to find an earlier appointment with a specialist (her scheduled appointment is a month away), make sure your staff can't do anything without your approval - and remember, you're out for the day.

7. Allow the other doctor, who knows nothing about the situation, to read her the results and explain them. This doctor is now confronted by the fact that mom-to-be has done her research and knows enough to be really panicky. She knows about the false positives that occur so often on this test, but she also knows that most of the false positives occur when the baby is at risk of other disorders, not neural tube problems (which encompasses more than just spina bifida - in fact, one neural tube disorder causes a baby to be born without a complete brain, destined to die within hours).

At this point, other members of the medical profession aside from the OB/GYN can get involved with the insanity project.

8. If you're a perinatologist (maternal-fetal medicine specialist), make sure you are booked solid for months. Tell the mom-to-be that she will be scheduled based on priority, but when she calls back, let her know that there are no appointments available before the one she has scheduled at one of your affiliates' offices many weeks away.

9. Make sure that all the major perinatology centers in your area are controlled by your one company, and have the doctors do only one specialized ultrasound (known as a level two or genetic ultrasound) in a hospital per day, so that the wait is really, really long everywhere any mom-to-be goes.

10. When the mom-to-be calls back on Tuesday (having this all occur on Memorial Day weekend is key) to get some help from her OB/GYN, have the staff tell her that the doctor is on vacation. Said staff member should hang up the phone quickly or risk hearing some sort of smart-assed remark about hoping the doctor having a fan-freaking-tastic vacation.

11. Wait until the mom-to-be calls back the OB/GYN office in a truly crazed state before getting a staff member really involved in helping her. Wait for her to say something like this, "I can't sleep, I can't work, I'm throwing up, and I just can't wait until June 16th to find out if I'm carrying a baby that is going to die!" After all, driving her crazy was your goal, wasn't it?

12.Now, and only now, can you allow the staff member to be actually helpful. This person moves the specialized ultrasound to June 12th and actually listens when "mom-to-be" requests (maybe demands) a regular ultrasound because her research (damn that research) indicates that a normal sonograph will catch the life-ending disorder (called anencephaly) and other gross abnormalities.

13. The sympathetic sonographer foils the insanity patrol for once and for all and ends a week-and-a-half of stress, vomiting, extra gray hairs, and general insanity with the words, "I can't see anything wrong with this baby."

Now, I realize that my doctor probably knew nothing about this whole thing. I have a feeling that he never received the second test results that were allegedly faxed to him at another office. I'm sure he didn't know that his receptionist told me that he would call me that day. He just doesn't strike me as someone who has a sadistic streak. He seems to be a genuinely nice guy. I know he didn't purposefully go to great lengths to drive me crazy as listed above. But since I'm just now recovering from being insane, I believe I'm justified in venting anyway I see fit, as long as it's on paper (or computer) and not with a weapon or something.

The most stressful part of the whole experience was weeding my way through the medical bureaucracy. Several times I sat and cried, "Why won't anyone help me? I'm doing this all alone!" My poor husband felt like this was addressed to him to a certain extent, but it wasn't. I really felt like getting the testing dates changed should have been the job of my doctor and/or his office. And if the dates couldn't be moved up, why take the damn test at all?

Out of all of my venting, that's probably the one thing I WILL say to my doctor when I see him again. Why give a screening test if you have no intention of doing anything with the results?