Monday, June 29, 2015Tonight's picture was taken on June 15, 2009. Mattie was in the pre-op area getting ready for his sternotomy. By this point, this pre-op area was getting to be an old routine for us, since Mattie had already had two major surgeries before this one. In order to lighten the mood, Peter wrote a sign on Mattie's hospital gown. The sign was meant for Mattie's surgeon, Dr. Chahine. The sign read.... "Dr. Chahine.... give us a Mattie Miracle!!!!" Meaning, we were asking Dr. Chahine to remove all of Mattie's lung tumors that day.
Quote of the day: There is no illness that is not exacerbated by stress. ~ Allan Lokos
Over the course of the weekend, I felt as if I was passing a kidney stone. So my urologist advised me to get an X-ray today to confirm what was going on and to see if I had other stones. That meant that I had to contact my other doctors to request the scan. The beauty of healthcare in many ways is you have to constantly advocate for yourself and at times be your own physician. Though I like my nephrologist, I know that his office is dysfunctional and the likelihood that I would get a hold of him today and get the scan completed with results would be low. So instead, I contacted my internist, who I have seen for years.
However in order to get access to my doctor, I had to work through her gatekeepers. I left a message with her nurse at 6:30am. However, by 10am, the nurse hadn't called me back, and I wasn't planning on waiting any longer. So I called the office back and dealt with the receptionist. I feel for her, because she really did not know what hit her. She wanted to put me in a voice mail, and I told her absolutely not, that I needed to talk to a live person and I needed my issue dealt with today. I gave her the history of my problem and she tried to tell me that my urologist needed to order the X-ray for me. When I told her that my urologist doesn't handle kidney stones, she started arguing with me. Not a good plan, because I let her have it, until we had a meeting of the minds.
Finally we got on the same page, and she got a hold of my doctor, got the scan ordered for me, and even arranged for my doctor to call me in the hospital with the results. So clearly my level of agitation came across in spades. When you go through five days of pain, with no one really helping you manage the pain.... edgy seems like a very natural by product in my book. Now with the July 4th holiday coming up, I wanted answers!!!
With all that said, being in hospitals put me on a heightened sense of alert. They make me anxious and after my scan was done today they put me in a holding room, until my doctor called me with the results. This is the same type of holding room with a phone that I was in when I received Mattie's scan results at Virginia Hospital Center on July 23, 2008. It was just too eerie today, and sitting in that room made me tense. Almost like a caged rat until the phone rang and I got to talk to my doctor who confirmed, another stone.
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