Val Gets Her Humerus Caught In a Wringer

Today was supposed to be my last day of school. Ha ha! Funny how almost dying last year enabled me to miss the final day this year. Okay. I suppose it's not funny ha ha. It's funny peculiar.

Yes, last year on this date, I was being sprung from a three-day hospital stay for multiple bilateral pulmonary embolisms. Let the record show that I survived. My pulmonologist just so happened to schedule me for my one-year check-up today. Like he was scary psychic back then, and knew how many snow days we would have, and that this would be the very last work day for me. So...tomorrow I will be working my last, while everyone else is starting their summer vacation.

I am really quite tired this evening. This doctor visit wore me out more than going there while I was still under the influence of blood clots. Back then, even though I had to walk slowly, Hick let me out at the entrance while he went to park. Today, no such luck. My prince was a toad. He zoomed right past that entrance, all the way down to the opposite end of the parking garage, and backed into the next to next to last space. So I had to walk all the way back to the entrance.

Well, I knew what I was in for. We were in Building C, headed for the 2nd floor. We walked down a long hall and veered left and came to a dead-end with the elevators. Up we went one floor, then retraced our steps at that level, going past where the entrance would have been below, and twice as far again.

"Great. Just like last time, they're not going to open their door. I'm sitting down here on this bench until they start letting people in." Let the record show that my appointment was for 10:00, and it was now 9:40. We had left home at 8:15 to allow for traffic and walking. Last time, the receptionist was really kind of hateful to patients daring to enter her sanctuary. She unlocked the door to let us in, but wouldn't turn on the lights until 10:00. Then she didn't give out the forms until she was done chewing out some poor vendor on the phone.

Hick kept his eye peeled for the grand opening. Apparently that building does a booming business in high-risk pregnancies and ultrasounds, because women were virtually pouring out of that door right across from our bench. Hick decided that at 9:55, we would storm the pulmonologist's office and demand entrance. Indeed, the lights were still off, and the door was locked. Hick pounded like an angry mob member who had handed off his flaming torch to his buddy. "It's 9:56. This is ridiculous." He pounded some more.

A custodian came by, pushing a cart of supplies. "Oh, he moved. His office is in A Building now. Third floor."

"That explains it. Might have been nice if they had notified us. Do you know how to get to the new office?"

"Go on up this hall, all the way to the end until you can't go any farther. Turn right. Go all the way to the end until you can't go any farther. Turn right again. Go all the way to the end, to the elevators. Go up one floor. It's the first office on the right."

"Thank you so much! We never would have found it."

Off we went, with three minutes to make my appointment. The place we ended up was where we had originally driven in, before getting to the parking garage. I daresay we walked about a mile to get back to before where we started. Hick was nearly apoplectic. "I will go get the car and pick you up out front when we leave."

In the new waiting room, I was the first patient. The girl (a newer, more cheerful version) finished talking with two men untangling telephone cables, and said, "Oh, bear with me. You're our first patient in the new office." Yeah. These things only happen to Val. I filled out three patient forms while Hick kept grousing about how they moved and didn't tell anybody. An older, crankier gal came out and started stacking the magazines, as if they'd had anybody to mess them up since we came in, the very first patient in the new office.

"I'm gonna tell her!"

"Don't be scary."

"I don't care what they think of me. They need to learn how to run a business. I bet there's people who miss their appointment because they can't find this place." He complained to the old gal.

"Didn't you get a letter?"

"No. I have this card they gave me a year ago, with the old office address. I never got a call or a letter telling me any different."

"We sent out a letter to every patient on our appointment calendar. We don't make calls. We have too many patients to make calls. Besides, we put a big sign on the window of the old office."

"I didn't see no sign. Just a map that said, 'You are here.'"

"Well, we put the sign there so people can find the way here."

Let the record show that what they said was a sign was only that map, with no clue that my doctor had moved.

Anyhoo, I was called back, again congratulated for being the very first patient in the new office (you'd think they'd at least have awarded me a metal toolbox like my dad won at the Montgomery Ward grand opening in Poplar Bluff, Missouri, when I was six), and shown to an exam room without a sphygmomanometer. Or so the CNP thought, until a nurse chased her into my exam room to get back the one she had plundered, and said, "We're keeping them in the side drawer of the exam table."

Then the CNP said that I was going to be seen by her, what with me being the first patient in the new office, and the doctor not there yet. She took vitals and pumped that sphygmomanometer tighter than Popeye's hand around a can of spinach. It hurt SO bad that it was all I could do to keep from whining. And let the record show that when I had my gallbladder attack resulting in emergency surgery several years ago, the nurse said I had the highest pain tolerance of any gallbladderist she had ever seen.

The CNP said my BP was 160/90, and I replied, "From the pain." Because usually it's lower than that, but then usually I haven't just walked the equivalent of the distance from England to France, which I totally thought was possible until just last year when The Pony informed me that England is an island!

Anyhoo, my Asian doctor who must be all of 50 years old, but looks about 22, and acts around 12, sitting on his knees on the rolling exam stool, came in and booted out the CNP and made me feel very much lower-blood-pressury, because I think he's hilarious. He had me breathing into a tube, and listened to all lung lobes, and told me he was very happy that I was doing well, and that he reviewed the previous two blood tests, which were completely normal, and all he could think to advise me was to have a lupus test, because that is the third of only three blood tests he believes might actually show a reason for a blood clot.

We were out of there soon after two nurse-type people wrestled over the lab order for me to bring back home for a local blood draw, since I was in no mood to go walk all over Missouri Baptist Hospital to give my sample. Funny how that one gal tried to give me all three of the triplicate copies, but the CNP grabbed them out of her hand and ripped off the bottom one, and said, "She only needs this one," and the order-writer tried to grab it back, and said, "At least give her the top copy, because it's more legible." Seriously. She wrote it one time, and it self-carbonated. It's not like she wrote out three different forms. More legible, indeed.

It's a wonder I survived this appointment that was only to show that I'm well now. A calm day of professional development and room-straightening would have been more soothing.

When we left, Hick took off the way we had come. He told me to go down to ground level and wait out front, by the valet parking guys. It took him a good 10 or 15 minutes to reappear with T-Hoe.

I didn't have the heart to tell him that if he had only walked out at ground level, he could have taken a diagonal path over to the parking garage without going all the way back through A, B, and C building.