A Momentary Break...

...from the home birth story. The Cat Daddy thinks all the gory details are TMI, but I'm thinking my male readership will come back when I move on to other topics. Which will be soon; I'm almost done.

Today, however, I'm going to talk about my very cool grandma. She had breast cancer a few years ago. She's been doing great, but goes in every 6 months or so for checks and rechecks and such. In April she checked out great. Last week she went in for blood pressure-related tests and was very quickly scheduled for a cat scan because one of the x-rays, or scans, or something came out really bad. She was given very little info at first, then on Monday was told that basically it was a disaster and the situation was dire, and they were calling in an oncologist, and they were shocked that no one had told her any of this. My mom was there with her & asked some questions, among them wondering if there could be some mixup to explain such a sudden and drastic change in the situation. No one had any answers for her, partly because the doc who read the disastrous scan is on vacation until next week.

We had to have some hard conversations and make some difficult contingency plans. In some ways it was good to think these things thru, but it overwhelmed me with feelings & memories, and I felt rather small & fragile to be dealing with such heavy things.

And then the cat scan was yesterday, and it came back clean. Completely normal. There was indeed a mixup in the records. Big relief for us, but unfortunately someone else is running around completely unaware that they are in seriously bad shape. And unfortunately the hospital is having a hard time figuring out who that someone is, since the doc they need to talk to is still on vacay.

On one hand, statistically this sort of mistake is going to happen at some point--no person or institution is perfect. On the other it's easy to wonder who dropped the ball and how exactly they managed to determine that one person's test results belonged to someone else entirely. My mom is going to register a complaint. I'm going to call the entire place stupid buttheads and call it a day...