short strokes

I had been thinking that there'd be nothing to post until I went to see the plastic surgeon next week.  After all, my surgery has been set for almost two months now.  My arm has healed from the radiation.  The logistical planning was, at long last completed.

Then, this morning, I got a call from the cancer surgeon (Satcher)'s P.A.  Satcher needs to go to Europe for 3 days (never mind) and will be gone on 12/11, the day my surgery is scheduled.  So, my choices are to reschedule -- she offered 12/13 (only 2 days later), or to have another oncological orthopedist do the operation. 

So there were a couple funny things.  First, after my conversation with her, THEN the doc called.  I'd gotten out my rage and dismay by then.  It reminded me of when Ben's pediatrician would come do his examination and, when she was done, send her nurse in to give him the shots.  Just in reverse in terms of timing.

When I suggested to Angela that this was easy for them to do, because they don't care about how many hoops might have to be wiggled through, again, or the costs of rescheduling, or the lost costs of all of the hours of planning that had already gone into fitting the jig saw puzzle together, she protested, "Don't say we don't care -- we do!  We'll send the airlines letters for you!"  Thank you, of course.  But the level of under-appreciation was just stunning.  And calling two weeks out...

I counted after we got off the phone:  There's 7 people traveling, including me.  Two (me and Bill) are traveling twice, so there's nine roundtrip plane tickets.  There's five different hotel rooms, some with multiple people arriving and leaving on different nights, for a total of 17 nights.  There's the pet sitter for 5 nights, and one sister-in-law, both of whom will be using the guest room.  And, of course while our family doesn't celebrate Xmas, the airlines and hotels all price accordingly -- and have availability commensurate with holiday travel, especially when we start to have to change reservations this close out.

As I said on Facebook (in 160 characters) AARGH.  Never mind that they were supposed to get back to me by COB today with an answer on whether my request to reschedule earlier, the Friday before, 12/6, would work, as opposed to two days later.  While two days later is "only" 48 hours difference, it totally screws up all of the plans of friends and family coming and going.  And, it pushes the required post-discharge stay in Houston to last a whole week, including Xmas.  It was also ironic to me that, team approach notwithstanding, Angela said she'd never heard of patients being asked to stay for a week post-discharge, something the plastic surgeon's Physical Assistant had said was an automatic request for all patients traveling to MD Anderson by air!

When she and Satcher called, interestingly, they had not talked to the plastic surgeon.  One of the odd things to me is that he is -- in my mind at least -- just as important as Satcher.  I can hear Eve saying right now, "it's not rocket science."  And maybe neither is the reconstruction.  But to me I want the reconstruction to be 'art' in a way that the cancer removal can just be mechanical, albeit done just right.  But that part doesn't need to be beautiful in the way that the reconstruction does.  The latter is my quality of life, after all.