Verdict

There was a lot of waiting involved in this "quick rush in" appointment. I'm pretty used to that with Dr. Williams, so I just rolled with it and was appreciative that he was willing to squeeze me in before the long weekend.

The bones and hardware are all still in place and in tact. I have some uber anti-inflammatories, and a script for more PT (pretty much what I expected). He offered massage and other pain blockers, but I declined. Really I just want to do something to make it feel better. I don't mind hard work or habit changing, but I'm not interested in covering it up and hoping it goes away.

Now, what was I going to do with my Friday again?

Update

Since Mom is reading this I thought some other folks might be also. Here's the latest:

After leaving a message with "Jennifer the Amazing" last night, I waited until 9 to hear back from her. My back woke me up at 7, so 9:00 was much later in the day than it normally is on my days off. At 9:05 I hadn't heard back from the usually very prompt nurse, so figured Jennifer was wrapped up in something else. I decided to call in to the front desk and get the appointment process started with them.

I'm pretty happy with Dr. Williams, and Jennifer is great, but OPA as an organization is a very typical corporate medical institution with ridiculous hoops and phone trees. I try to avoid calling the front desk whenever possible. This morning was a good example of why:

Call 1: "Please listen to the whole menu as our options have changed. For appointments press 5...(I press 5)...This is the perscription refill request line. Please leave the following information at the tone...(I hang up)

Call 2: "Please listen to the whole menu as our options have changed. For appointments press 5...(I press 5 very carefully)...This is the perscription refill request line. Please leave the following information at the tone...(I try all the little secret get me out of this menu buttons I can think of including * and # with no success. I hang up)

Call 3: I try for Jennifer's direct extension again, but she's still not there and I'm not going to leave a second message to bother her.

Call 4: "Please listen to the whole menu as our options have changed." This time I listen to the whole stupid menu and hear that I should press 8 for perscription refills. I press 8 hoping that the two lines are just reversed. Instead I get the emergency response nurse who is peeved that she's talking to me. She doesn't seem terribly interested in the fact that the phone tree sent me here unwittingly, and transfers me to the front desk. I sit on hold for a while, get a brief contact with someone and sit on hold a while longer. Eventually the receptionist gets back to me and I find out that Jennifer isn't in today so she's going to transfer me back to the operator where I should dictate a detailed message to be typed up and given to the person filling in for Jennifer today. Turns out that the operator is also the person who answers the emergency line, and she's again delighted to hear my voice.

I've left the message and I'm once again in a holding pattern waiting to hear back about an appointment.

Sigh.

The nice thing about cell phones is I can still go out to breakfast with my boy and I won't miss the call back. (deleted unnecessary snarky comment here) Maybe I'll give a couple PT exercises a try while I wait for Russell to be ready to go eat.


By the time I finished typing this I got a call back, and I'm heading straight to the office right now.

Staying in place.

I had a nice walk to the clinic with Russell and then we sat down and waited...
Then Max showed up and we waited some more...
The majority of the staff was running around with that White Rabbit look in their eyes "I'm Late! I'm Late!"
We waited some more...
Jennifer, the amazing nurse of amazingness, eventually came out to lead us back to an exam room
Then she taped a light-weight metal ball to the lump in my back and sent me off for x-rays
I came back from the x-rays and Russell, Max, and I waited A LOT more...

Russell and Max must like me a whole awful lot, because neither of them is terribly comfortable staying in place for this long. We were all pretty tired and hungry by the time Dr. Williams made it to our room. So was Dr. Williams I imagine.

His first question was "Did I miss it?!" We have a mutual friend who spilled the beans about my SEAF entry and he was quite excited by this prospect. Clearly no segue was required to bring out the thank-you gifts. I presented the beautifully framed proof (thank you for all your help Robbie) and two pair of SEAF passes to a very delighted (if slightly harried at the end of his day) doctor and his nurse.

We didn't need to talk much about the x-rays or my progress because things are staying in place just exactly the way they should. The metal ball on my back confirmed that the hardware lump is the cross link and we can remove it easily enough, but it's probably best to wait until October or November. That creepy crunchy sensation people feel when I do my latest stupid human trick is a bursa that my body decided to grow over the hardwear to prevent wear and tear on the tissue around it. The human body is just freakin cool!

We discussed getting a masage therapy referral, but forgot to actually pass paperwork around at the end of the day. I'll call the office on Thursday and see about correcting that and make the next appointment for the beginning of July.

Oh! And!! I'll likely be cleared for Swing Dancing in 3 months! Yay! (yes all those exclamation points really are necessary)

Feeling good post-gym

I've made it to the gym 3 of the last 4 days. Tonight I'm feeling really good. Really really good. The muscles in my back feel strong and active, and the rest of my body is quite happy about the additional moving around. Even more than the physical, I'm feeling really good emotionally. I'm full of gratitude for the people at the forks in the road that brought me here today.

• To Dale who has provided quiet reassurance and friendly, loving perspective for nearly 10 years of this journey
• To Ernie who escorted me to my first play party and proved that not all the people one meets via the internet are psycho killers (even if they do suggest you meet them in a foreign country and attend a secret-ish event).
  
• To Seawandrr and Opium who opened their home and hearts to me and introduced me to so very many wonderful things about the kink community--including many of the people mentioned below
  
• To Bob whose love pulled me away from my cabin in the woods and into the big city permanently
  
• To Cat Tailor whose love, wisdom, wit, and passion helped me through the toughest parts of my Saturn Return
  
• To Maven whose love, patience, and honesty gave me the courage to change
• To Russell whose gifts are far too many to list here
• To Lauren who decided I was family
• To Kaylee who became the exception to most of my rules
• To Lorelie whose life has woven across mine some remarkable ways
  
• To Max who saw and accepted my offering
• To the friend of a friend whose short conversation with me gave me the confidence to quit poking around for second opinions and just do it
• To all the health-care professionals I've worked with over the last year every one of whom respected my honesty and encouraged my active participation in my own health-care
  
• To my employer who allows me to be honest about my way of life and provides kick-ass health benefits
  

It's hard to play the what-if game with one's history, but I'm quite certain that I'd be a very different person in a very different place were it not for each and every one of the people listed above. I look at this list and see many more people that I could fill in. My life is completely blessed by love and generosity. The people not listed here are no less important to the path I've wandered to get where I am today, I hope they know that too.

Tid-bit update

I did get to the gym on the 24th. I walked too hard and wound up sore, but I got moving. It was good. I suspect I won't be back again until Monday. Oh well.

I have both PT and Surgeon's appointments on Tuesday. I'll let you all know how that goes.

While chatting with Russell about a workshop he's planning, I realized how easy it is to forget having had surgery. Unless one forgets completely about just having had surgery, offering to be a stunt-bottom/co-teacher for a flogging workshop in February doesn't make much sense. Oops.

Up till the last couple weeks, I haven't felt too much financial burden from this surgery. I work at an awesome institution that provides really good health-care benefits (I haven't had to pay a dime out of pocket since surgery). I also had been working there long enough to accrue enough sick and vacation time to cover the vast majority of the time I was out. However, with the icy roads and sidewalks keeping me home, I'm finally running up on the point when surgery causes money to be tight. Oh well, this is what I created a savings account for.

Micro-update and Question List

I came down with a nasty little virus mid-day Thursday and I'm only just coming back up. That means that my blood donation schedule is off now. Oh well, the best laid plans...

Here's an interactive bit:
I'm starting to compile a list of the various things I want to ask my surgeon and his nurse less than 24 hours before surgery. I'll keep a running list on this post. If you have a question you think I should add to the list, drop me a comment. I need help with this people. I'm pretty damn good at gathering information indirectly through intuition and synthesis, but asking direct questions is not my strong suit.

The question list:

• How long do they expect I'll be in which parts of the hospital? (Surgery, ICU/Recovery, Patient room)
  
• Will I see the surgeon before surgery? How soon after will he check in?
  
• What are the policies around electronics in patient rooms? (iPod? Laptop? Wireless access?)
• At what point will the first people come see me after surgery?
• How do updates of my surgery progress get to family members? (Should they all hang out there all day? Should they rotate through, but keep someone there all day? Is there some pager system in case they all wander off?)
• Who do I need to tell about my picky diet stuff? How much space is there for making accommodations?
• Will there be more digital x-rays or other images I can have access to?
• What items should I bring with or specifically leave home? (I have several lists, but I want to cross reference with what the nurse says on this one.)
  

Praise be to the merciful Red Tape gods

They are sadistic fuckers, but in the end they came out on my side so I guess that's alright. I've been toodeling about making appointments getting ready for 10/1. Yesterday was full of a little more generalized panic than usual, but all in all I'm fairing pretty well. Then this afternoon my phone rings at work...

It's the business office for my orthopedic group. They're calling to let me know that my insurance company is not going to cover my costs the way they should because I don't have a direct referral on file. WHAT?!! I've been seeing this Dr for more than a year and now they bring that up?

After making a small scene in my office and several confused and frantic phone calls to my primary care Dr's office, there was nothing more I could do but wait. I'm used to waiting days and even weeks for things to work out. Today, it was about an hour before I got a call back. For reasons the office administrator didn't fully understand, all the referrals I needed were applied retroactively no questions asked.

Health care in this country is really weird.

April 08 X-rays

Today was the day of getting little stuff done. In addition to basic domestic duties, I started yet another small health-insurance battle, completed a pre-admission form for the hospital, scheduled my pre-surgery haircut for tomorrow, rescheduled the trip to the fair previously planned for tomorrow, successfully donated a unit of blood, scheduled the final office visit with my surgeon, and picked up the digital x-rays from my April visit to Dr. Wagner at UW.

You may note the x-ray in the sidebar has changed. With much thanks to Russell who just happened to have magic software for reading medical image files, that's actually me over there now. The curves appear to be going the opposite direction of the original, but that's because they were showing them from the back instead of the front.

I've gone ahead and posted these under a link in case someone is feeling squeamish about pictures of bones today: Here is a very reduced version of my full length x-ray and a slightly closer view of just the torso (this is the same as the one in the side bar, only large enough for you to see).

Coming to you LIVE

I'm typing to you from my most recent surgery-prep purchase:
The new laptop desk/bed tray

On Monday, I had my first insurance-sponsored massage treatment. So besides the fact that I'm getting these massages to loosen up my back and reduce stress before surgery, I'm talking about it here because of a conversation we had during the session. It went something like this:
"So what kinds of physical activity do you do?" He asks
"Oh, walking, a little bit of weight lifting, and I'm taking a belly dance class once a week." I say.
"Ok and what else?"
"I do some yoga before and after working out and I try to get out dancing a few times a month."
"That's nice and what else?"
***I pause here. It's possible he's just trying to make small talk and not really paying attention, but this is clearly my opening to talk about my other activities. There are two schools of thought in the category of sharing kinky proclivities with one's health care providers: "What I do in my bedroom is my business," or "How can I get good health care if my providers don't know what I'm really doing with my body?" I fall pretty solidly into the latter category, although I try not to overshare or make people too uncomfortable. The fact that I spend some regular portion of my free time being twisted into knots and hung from the ceiling seems pretty relevant to massage therapy.
"Well, I do some rope suspension. That's why you may see some marks on the backs of my arms and around my rib cage." This is what I like to call a verbal traffic cone. It's clear that I do something different, but if the other person wants to he or she can just leave it alone and walk around it.
***This is clearly taking a moment to register
"Ah," he laughs a little "kinky stuff." His tone indicates he thinks he's joking.
"Well yes, actually." I respond. If the last sentence was a traffic cone this is an Enter at your own risk sign.
After stammering about for a moment, he did actually enter. He had aparently attended a workshop at the Wetspot before. We spent some time talking about poly and kink and D/s while he did stuff that made me make a lot of the same noises I make in scene. I felt really good physically and mentally after I left. I'm looking forward to going back next week.

Dr Wagner

Posted to LJ on Apr. 8th, 2008 at 7:52 PM

Dr. Wagner is not cranky. OLD yes, cranky no.
Getting in to see him was a little akin to registering for classes at the U. Or at least as the UW registration experience is compared to the SMC registration experience. There were many more desks to stand at, repetitive forms to fill out, and gratuitous uses of computers. It wasn't particularly slow or even difficult to figure out, but it was much more complicated than walking in to a small clinic. Oh and once I got in the exam room there were like 9 different colored blinking lights that sent messages to the central control desk about my current status. Oh Oh and the X-ray machine was computer operated and reported its results out to some server so the doc could just log on to the computer in the exam room and find and draw on my films right there in front of me. (He was OLD but quite technically literate)

The results:
He said pretty much exactly what the last doc said. My case isn't exactly unique or noteworthy as scoliosis goes. My thoracolumbar (lower) curve is the most dramatic (bent and rotated), but the thoracic curve is clearly not just a compensation. If we only correct the lower curve there's a good chance I'll wind up looking more tilted than I do now. The surgery he described and the length of the fusion were the same as I heard before.

I did feel more comfortable with him than with Dr. Car-salesman. The UW clinic might be institutional, but at least they're up front and efficient about it. My only concern: Dr. Wagner is OLD, as in considerably less coordinated than his younger counterparts (he dropped stuff, knocked things over, and lost his train of thought during dictation several times). On the other hand, he's got TONS of experience. If something weird comes up chances are good he's already seen cases like it and will know what to do.

Where do I go from here?
The scoliosis surgery book shipped today so I'll probably spend quality time reading that with Russell over the next few weeks. Provided I don't learn anything new, I'll make calls to schedule surgery in the first week of May (call in May for surgery in October)