Grinding the Quest

So, this may be a quick one. Or maybe it will be a long ramble that leads us nowhere. I guess the only thing we have for it is to begin and see where it takes us.

To start off, it’s been a week of doctors’ visits. During the middle of the week was a yearly physical with my general practitioner. But I will get to that in a moment. The more important moment was the visit earlier this week to the surgeon.

Essentially, we are at the three-month mark of my last surgery. This meant a trip to Detroit for the check up and see where we go from here. For anyone keeping score, this is about a 2.5-hour drive to and from for an appointment. Yep, it’s a bit of work, especially when you hit traffic on the freeway in downtown Detroit. And all of that for an appointment that lasted roughly 10 or so minutes.

Flickr Creative Commons via Daniel Lobo
License

Can you imagine? At least 5 hours of my day spent for something that registers as barely a blip of the day…

But I digress… Yeah, here we are right now with needing a quick appointment because it feels like I have stabilized a bit. There isn’t a surgery scheduled again in the immediate future. Instead I have another appointment in three months that will hopefully go the same as this one did. Even after the driving it is a good feeling to know that I won’t have to go back under the knife any time soon. Especially when you consider that at this stage, if I go back under, it means I am left with reconstruction. That is the nuclear option. There are times I feel like I am in a cold war with my body. But still, pretty much good news.

Which brings us to the physical. As it seems to go with this one, it’s a bit of back and forth of how you are feeling and are there any new problems going on. I like the doctor I am working with right now even when I only see him maybe once a year or so. There isn’t a ton of stress involved in the interactions. I don’t know about you, but over the years I have gone through some that I am happy to move away from.

Anyway, one thing that I thought weird though, the offices in Detroit haven’t sent any of the surgery information to this office. Granted they are different hospitals and such. But I have to wonder, what is the point of asking me who my doctor is if you are never going to send them the information about what I am going through? The world rarely makes sense I think.

Life goes on of course. At this point I remain in a readied mode for an escalation of an autoimmune attack. The main thing is to keep things under control, so I don’t end up back in surgery to fix damage done. That’s probably the weirdest thing. Usually when there is a problem you want to attack the root cause so that the symptoms will cease to be an issue. When it’s autoimmune, the best you can hope for is to minimize the outbreak so that the symptoms don’t become an issue. You can’t stop them from happening, but you can hope to lessen their devastation.

And that is where we stand right now. Life goes on and we hope to keep the worst things under some semblance of control. Hope for the days where the hours wasted lean toward happier outcomes along the way. Because, life remains a bit of grinding on the next quest we are hoping to finish.

###

If you enjoy these stories, consider leaving some coffee money in the jar or you could buy a book or two. Either way helps keep the stories flowing.