Don't Call Us, We'll Call You

Yesterday, I celebrated Canadian Thanksgiving in style by eating my weight in candy corn, pumpkin cheesecake and turkey. Today, I feel slightly queasy, probably because the amount of sugar I've consumed has the Diabetes Fairy fluttering her wings at my window. So, between the sugar hangover, the gray Fall day and the fact that I went to visit my grandma today in the care home and all the old people were lined up in their wheelchairs to watch soap operas but none of them could see the TV so they simply stared into space...yeah, it's no wonder I have my cranky pants on.

Part of the reason I am cranky, too, is because today my surgeon was supposed to phone after conferencing with my neurologist to give me some indication of what's wrong with the hip. My surgeon is a nice-enough guy, but like most surgeons he's the master of "don't call us, we'll call you...roughly 3 weeks after we promised we would...and only then to tell you that we've lost your file/MRIs/X-rays/whatever and could you please re-send them so that in a month we'll be able to answer whatever simple request you had." When I was trying to book my surgery, I was so "persistent" (granted, I wouldn't have had to be "persistent" if they hadn't put me through a four-month Kafka-esque trial of ridiculousness just to get an operating date) that they actually changed the answering machine to note that "if you have already called once about your problem, please do not call again."

So, while I had high hopes that today might be the day that someone figures out what's wrong with my Freaky Cyborg Hip, I know that more realistically it could be next week...or two years later....or five days from now when I get fed up and sic my lawyer father on them, which tends to produce better responses. Now, I know that orthopedic surgeons and their secretaries are busy, and I appreciate that most orthopedic surgeons are not truly happy unless their patients are unconscious and they can focus on what really interests them, which is playing with medical powertools. Fair enough. If I had a job like that, I too would probably be like, "Ok, enough will all your jabbering on about your 'complications' and 'pain' and 'inability to walk without looking like a monster.' When do I get to saw someone's leg off?"And I'm sure that if there's one person who wants me to get better, it's my surgeon, since he wants to keep his spotless operating record and to do that, he either needs to prove that he didn't royally fuck me up, or figure out how he royally fucked me up and fix me.

Still, as time ticks on and my patience dwindles, it becomes less and less easy to sit still and wait for medical professionals to figure out what to do with me. So we'll see. I'm giving him until Thursday to call and then I'm coming out with verbal guns blazing. (Or...you know...I will just complain about it on my blog. Whichever).