The nursery rhyme "monkeys jumping on the bed" gives children the impression that you can just call your family doctor who will pick up immediately.

If you were rich

Yes, at one time.

They just couldn’t fit “after a 24-hour turnaround and copay verification” into the song between “momma called the doctor and” and “the doctor said”.

As recently as the small town where I grew up in the 1980s, yes, we had the local gp/fp doctor's home phone number and my mother would call him in an emergency rather than engage the 45 minute drive to hospital. My parents, poor small farmers, did not carry insurance that would cover an ambulance ride.

Or, the momma never called the doctor in the first place. A real doctor would have said “talk to my nurse first. Then come in for expensive tests. Then I need to refer you to my specialist friend.”

Or, slightly less cynically, the doctor would have said “bring the monkey who bumped his head to urgent care and we’ll check for concussion.”

“No more monkeys jumping on the bed” sounds like straight up mom stuff.

Momma knew what she was doing 👀