Bella Vida Health Care Clinic and Medi-Spa

The reason that I'm writing this review on the Bella Vida Healthcare Clinic is to caution other potential patients before anyone else has to experience what my wife and I have experienced.
After moving to New Mexico last fall, my wife began looking for a healthcare provider as she has serious pain issues because of arthritis affecting her back and neurofibromatosis, which causes tumors to grow on her femoral nerve in her leg. She also needed a general practitioner to prescribe some medications that she's been taking for years.
She decided to try Bella Vida Healthcare in Los Lunas and began seeing Celia A, a nurse practitioner. Celia gave her the necessary prescriptions so she could continue what she had been taking before she moved to NM. She also offered her Hydrocodone for her pain, as it had increased to the point where my wife could not prepare the evening meal without having to lay on the sofa to rest her back.
When my wife returned for the monthly visit, she was asked for a urine sample so it could be tested to assure that she was actually taking the Hydrocodone. This was the normal procedure each month, for three months, and there seemed to be no problems or concerns as a result of these tests. The morning after the last visit, Celia's nurse called my wife and told her that all three of the monthly tests had come back negative and that Celia would no longer be able to prescribe the pain medication. My wife was obviously rather stunned, as she had been taking the medication as directed for over three months. When she asked the nurse how the tests could come back negative when she had been taking the medication, as directed, every day. The nurse was extremely arrogant and unprofessional and told her that there was no way that she was taking the Hydrocodone or it would have shown up in the tests. As I knew for sure that she had been taking the medication every day, I decided to contact the laboratory, *** in Albuquerque, to get an explanation as to what had happened.
I spoke with a lady and told her exactly what had happened and asked for an explanation of what could have caused the negative results. She put me on hold and called the toxicology specialist. When she came back, she told me that she was not allowed to give me any test results, as she was not a physician, but she could tell me that Celia had been requesting an incorrect test to find the presence of Hydrocodone in the system. She also told me that Celia could have requested a "confirmation test" specifically for the presence of Hydrocodone in the system, when the original test came back negative, which she never requested.
My problem with Bella Vida and Celia A is not so much her lack of competence and Bella Vida's lack of supervision of her, as it is her decision, and obviously Bella Vida's decision to keep the negative test results from us. By keeping this information from us, we were prevented from resolving the question of why the tests came back negative until the third incorrect result which Celia's nurse said made it illegal for her to prescribe again. Had she been a competent professional, she would have ordered the correct test. When the results came back negative, a competent, compassionate professional would have given my wife the benefit of the doubt and ordered a "confirmation test" specifically for the drug she was looking for. She also would have made us aware of the problem and explained that if the test came back negative three times, she wouldn't be able to prescribe again. We would have resolved the question before it became a problem.
Fortunately, *** still had the urine specimen from the test, the day before and the *** representative was compassionate and professional enough to call Celia and suggest that she order the confirmation test, which she finally agreed to.
People with chronic pain have plenty of stress, just trying to get through each day. They certainly don't need additional, avoidable stress caused by incompetent, unprofessional healthcare providers that lack the compassion to actually do the best they can for their patients. I would strongly suggest that anyone with chronic pain seek out someone other than Bella Vida for their healthcare needs.