Like Ron Burgundy, I’m in a glass case of emotion: the GI appointment I thought was set for August is actually slated for tomorrow. You know your Crohn’s is on its best behavior when the doctor lets you go six months between appointments, so I won’t complain about that. But for the last 38 years of my life almost every trip to a GI at an academic hospital has been an endurance test; the whole process usually takes hours, most of it spent waiting, even if you’re one of the first appointments of the day.
You wait to check in, you wait to be taken to an exam room, and then you wait for the fellow or nurse to arrive. Once that conversation’s over, you wait for your doctor to stroll in. Then you wait endlessly at the lab down the hall or on another floor, where the phlebotomists spend more time gossiping with each other, or on the phone with their cousins, than stabbing us like they’re supposed to. The waiting continues even after you’re safely back at work or home, for weeks or months until the lab bill finally arrives without any frightening surprises. Only then can you finally relax.
If I’m sent for a blood test tomorrow, my anguished cries will echo across the country; the Humira safety labs my GI wants done quarterly are the same as the methotrexate safety labs my rheumatologist — who’s in private practice and uses different record-keeping software — runs quarterly. I forward those results to the IBD clinic through an online portal, as the GI instructed years ago in an effort to reduce wastefulness. But his office staff often forgets, probably due to high turnover, and inevitably someone named Kayley, Caylee or Kayleigh threatens to withhold my Humira refills if I don’t report to their lab.
The swallow study abnormality is unlikely to have anything to do with Crohn’s, so fingers crossed I’m in and out as quickly as possible tomorrow morning, with no orders for labs or scopes. There’s already more than enough to keep me busy this summer with PT in July and myriad checkups in August (and getting LSVT clearance from the ENT, who will probably address the stuck-pills business), and I need time for tennis, dioramas, watching terrible TV movies, and musing about what old ladies Crankenstein and I have become with our splurge wishlists.
Last month it was a French perfume she coveted, while I had designs on a British ‘dolls house,’ as they call it across the pond, that I’d like to turn into a pub (the notorious Bottoms Up). It beats the days I used to fantasize about owning a Roomba ripoff or subscribing to Tennis Channel Plus, but I suspect it would underwhelm our friends all the same. Unable to justify the cost of the shop that will house Bottoms Up, I sprung instead for a small addition that can be used to ‘build out’ the larger kit, a purchase I’ll postpone until I need to reward myself for something unusually taxing (like, say, intensive speech therapy). At the rate things are going, I might have it by the fall.