Wednesday morning we arrived at the orthopedics clinic half an hour early. I filled out paper work while Joel looked at a magazine.
I kept a close eye on the women working the reception area. I kept listening to see if I recognized any of the voices from the previous day's phone calls.
After a very short wait, we were called into another sitting area to await another round of X-rays.
I had taken the precaution of not eating anything since the previous day's dinner in the hope that the doctor would be able to fix me up right away. I could have had a large breakfast and it wouldn't have made any difference.
When we first got to the clinic, the waiting room had been close to full, or so I had thought. When I returned to the waiting room after being X-rayed, I begin to understand what full meant and why I had originally been told June 16th. Every few moments there were new arrivals: people in casts, people on crutches, people in wheelchairs, children with their arms in slings. A man who couldn't have been older than forty arrived in a wheelchair. His left leg had been recently amputated at the knee. A young woman brought in a man in a wheelchair with a broken leg and a broken arm. He seemed to be totally lost someplace between pain and a medicated haze. A woman I took to be his mother joined them slghtly later.
It reached the point that the waiting room was at or beyond capacity. If some of these folks had not come in wheelchairs it would long ago have run out of seats. When the fifth or sixth wheelchair arrived with its human host and their escorts, the center of the room had become a tangle of wheels and walkers, casts and crutches. An old woman arrived on a gurney accompanied by oxygen bottles and EMS workers. Thy didn't try to bring her inside, but instead parked her gurney in the hallway. The hallway begin to fill with more hurt and damaged people.
Early on in this parade of hurt and wounded people I had begun to sink lower in my chair as I realized what a selfish, self-absorbed, snivelling brat I had been. The importance of my broken arm looked like nothing at all next to the injuries of the people around me.
Still, I was determined, if at all possible, to go to Japan.
My name was called and I headed back to an examining room with Joel in tow.
At this point I have to pause for a moment and sing Joel's praises. I am not a very good patient. I am also the queen of understatement, so you know that my husband puts up with a lot of rather irritating behavior on my part. I try to be good, really I do, but when the stakes are a three week trip to Japan, a trip that I have applied for five times over six years and only just now been accepted for, well, I get a little antsy. Thank God for Joel because, besides chauffeuring me around and putting up with me, he actually heard what the doctors and nurses said and remembered it. By this point, I had selective hearing loss.
The doctor took a look at my X-rays and gave me two options. One, have them put a cast on and have them X-ray it weekly , watching to make sure the bones don't move. The odds of the bones moving was pretty darned high and the consequences include operating, re-breaking the bone and using pins to put it back together. Option number two was surgery. They would install a metal plate and matching screws that will hold the bone together.
Personally, I was hoping to go for whatever was behind door number three, but this was apparently not an option.
I took choice number two. The doctor left the room while I tried to call the JFMF people and tell them what was happening. I had called the previous day and let them know about my arm, but I needed to keep them up to date about my status.
A nurse came and talked to me about the surgery. The hopes were that I would go in for surgery last Friday, but, as you'll soon see, this was not to be. She gave me a packet of papers that covered what I would need to do pre-surgery. As we finished up she told me that I would receive a phone call between 1:30 and 6:00 the next day telling me what time my surgery would be.
With that Joel and I were dismissed. He dropped me at the house and headed back to work. I went back to waiting.
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