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Friday, April 17, 2009

You know Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde? (You do know Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, right?) Well, Mom’s eye doctor is Dr. Jekyll and the Invisible Man. I took her to her appointment today and met her doctor. He’s a really nice guy, very personable and forthcoming, when he’s actually in the room with you. The trouble is, he disappeared in the middle of the exam.

Whatever he was looking for he didn’t find in the exam room. He opened every drawer in the room, and most of them (from my vantage point in a chair in the corner) seemed empty. So he took off for unknown parts to look for unknown tools, and he was gone so long the screensaver on his computer came on. And stayed on. A couple of times I stood up and poked my head out in the hall to see if I could trace his movements, but he was either ducking us or had forgotten we were there, so I went back to my corner.

I had gone along to try to help Mom remember what he said, in case he said anything important or interesting. What he said was that she had an infection, which I think she would have remembered without my assistance. He also said that he was going to make things okay again. I’m not sure she heard that part, so maybe it was a good thing I was there. I know I was relieved to hear it.

He prescribed three new kinds of eye drops, to add to what she was already using, but he printed the instructions for her to take home, so I was no help with that. It’s a good thing she has a magnifying glass, because that’s the only way she’ll be able to read the instructions. That was the reason we were there, you know. Because she couldn’t see to read without a magnifying glass.




That isn’t even the whole story, or the reason for the title of this entry. Dr. Jekyll sent us upstairs to the lab with a culture he had taken from Mom’s eye. (Feel free to shiver a little; I did.) At first they told us at the lab that they couldn’t accept it because it wasn’t labeled with her name, but they relented and allowed us to put a label on the tube ourselves. Then they said it was in the wrong kind of tube. They couldn’t send that kind of culture in for testing in a tube with a blue cap. It had to be a tube with a gray cap.

So we trudged (on the elevator) down to the doctor’s office and waited while the receptionist took the incorrectly-capped tube back to the exam area. After a few more minutes (and we’d already waited longer than anything like this should take), Dr. Jekyll’s very efficient assistant came storming out of the back with the tube in her hand. She told us to wait while she went upstairs to reason with the lab people.

After we’d waited a while longer, the assistant came back down and took Mom into the back with her, so that another culture could be taken and put into a tube with a gray cap. We then had trudge back up to the lab and turn it in. And after that we still had to stop by the pharmacy and pick up the three kinds of eye drops.




15 April 2009

This bush has also seen better days.



As you can imagine, we both were in a great mood by the time we’d been given the runaround this many times in one visit. It doesn’t seem nearly as much of an ordeal on reflection as it probably did at the time. For me, it was an outing, a day away from the phone. Mom was the one who had to deal with this while wondering if it would do her vision any good. We go back for another visit next week, where we might get some answers. If we do, this will all be worth it.




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Stuff

Giants 2, Diamondbacks 0. After the week the Giants had, I spent most of this one waiting for the other shoe to drop. They took a 1-0 lead in the fourth on hits by Pablo Sandoval and Bengie Molina, and then let Jonathan Sanchez work with that slim margin into the seventh. The bullpen had some nervous moments, but nothing like the meltdowns we’ve been seeing, and when Andres Torres hit his first home run as a Giant in the eighth (and his first major league homer since 2003), the stage was set for Brian Wilson to nail down his first save of the season, getting the last four outs of the game. For the sake of the battered starting rotation, I’m glad they didn’t need more runs to get Sanchez the win he so richly deserved.

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