You would think that given the events of yesterday, today would be a day of shouting matches and sit-ins and general ass-kickery. If my life was a movie, then today should have been the part where Gregorian chants play and there are lots of shots of the intrepid hero readying for battle and striding purposefully towards her destiny in slow motion. (See? More proof that my life should be a movie. You don't even need any special effects to make me walk in slow motion!)
It was not to be. The day started off with a bang, with my physio expressing rage over Dr. ___'s wake-me-up-when-something-more-interesting-than-restoring-Arley's-ability-to-walk-happens behaviour. She was not surprised at the diagnosis and was able to decode the fancy medical jargon of the report to tell me that a) the gluteus medius muscle is torn through, but is still attached at one site, so it's not completely flapping in the breeze like a windsock made of meat (sorry, that was gross) and b) that, despite what the neurologist told me, the nerve test did apparently show that my hip flexors have nerve damage, though on the MRI they are "within normal range." Still, no one can tell me what "fatty infiltration" means, so I am sticking with the mental image of chubby marshmallow men reinacting the beach scene from "Saving Private Ryan" until proven otherwise. So, it's not a total eclipse of the hip, more like a partial eclipse of the hip (a crescent moon?).
According to my physio, she's had one other patient who has had this problem. The patient was sent to the same SuperSurgeon *insert your own images of a really old white guy wearing spandex and a cape here* as I am being referred to and this SuperSurgeon refused to operate on her, even though she was fairly young (in her 50's) and active. The pain and muscle weakness never healed.
So, after that cheerful taste of things to come, I went home feeling incredibly confused. If I go to a second surgeon to get another opinion, will Dr. ___ no longer treat me? Should I phone Dr. ___ and give him hell (well, ok, leave a snarky phone message, since the chance of talking to Dr. ___ is roughly the same as the chance that I'll ever become a classically trained ballerina) or would that merely piss him off? If I go see a second surgeon, will it take months to get an operating time? But do I trust Dr. ___ to do the surgery? But, then again, wouldn't he have the most incentive to heal me? And do I even know if I need surgery? What if it's it already too late and I am fated to spend the rest of my life dropping my cane and being unable to pick it up without great awkwardness?
It turns out that there was nothing to be done anyways. My family doctor's office hadn't yet sent the referral so I couldn't make an appointment with the new surgeon and I decided to hold off on my knee-jerk reaction to phone Dr. ___ and tell him that he better start watching re-runs of "Frankenstein" because homeboy needs to get in the lab and grow me a brand new gluteus medius.
And so, in the absence of any meaningful progress, life went on (and I got that Beatles song stuck in my head). My ass was so bruised from sitting on the hard chairs at Starbucks (oh, New West Starbucks, why do you not have the plush Starbucks throne I enjoyed in Urbana?) that I chose to lay off doing a cardio workout. Instead, I hung out at the library and tried not to be too creeped out by the guys in trenchcoats who use the nonfiction section as their skulking grounds and always seem to be stroking their quasi-beards in great contemplation and holding large-print copies of Camus novels. I read some Canadian poetry, worked on my manuscript, and took out some books (for whatever reason, the overdue fines that I have avoided paying for the past 5 years due to a dispute I had with a librarian which is too ridiculous and convoluted to get into now have miraculously disappeared). Then I walked to the Dollar Store, bought a new notebook, and waited in line to pay for it for 10 minutes as some woman bought $50 worth of artificial plants, the chemically smell of which I could detect from a few feet away.
So, yes, while I was hoping that today would be a day where I go all Angelina-Jolie-In-Every-Movie-She's-Ever-Been-In on the medical community, instead it was a day to crank up the emo ballads and walk in the rain.
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