...follow the Bouncing Ball...

Many people ask my wife and I how we cope when we have to deal with the "Health Care System". As we have been so immersed in health care over the past 5 1/2 years we have had an amazing education. The process has been amazing, frustrating, enfuriating, depressing and pretty much every emotion that you can think of. I can honestly say we have seen the best and the worst the system can offer. The events of the past month or so can give you a little bit of an idea what we deal with on an ongoing basis. From my previous post you know that our son, Russell, was scheduled for a Heart Catheterization this past Monday. For the second time in a month; it was cancelled. Surprising...No...frustrating...you bet! Since his heart transplant this procedure has been an annual part of his ongoing care. His annual Cath was orginally scheduled for the end of March. There are several appointments and blood tests that are done in the week prior to the procedure. It's a lot of work. At the end of March, Russell was going thru a bit of a cold. This wasn't a big deal but he was certainly not 100%. Because he was ill we, our Doctors and us, decided to postpone. A reasonable decision. Then we were all set to go on Monday morning. We were up bright and early at 5:30 AM on Monday morning and arrived at the hospital at 6:45AM. We went thru admitting and headed up to Day surgery on the 3rd floor. Everything was going well...we had reqeusted some pre-sedation for Russell to help mellow him out. We were just getting ready to do vitals and pop in the IV when we got the phone call. Our Doctor was ill and the cath would be cancelled. Yay...another day shot! Keep in mind i've booked two days of holidays off for two procedures that were cancelled. In addition, because we gave Russell the "dope"; the anesthesiologist asked us to hang around the hospital for a couple of hours until we knew Russell was OK with the sedation we had given him. Fantastic...hanging around a hospital is one of our favourite activities. Keep in mind, that we had asked for the pre-sedation (so we have no one to blame but ourselves) but who does that? Volunteer your 5 year old for drugs! The second indicator that we are a little "out there" is that when we found out that we were cancelled. Our first thought was how we could make this trip into the hospital a little more worth while. Let's do blood work! The lab opens at 8:00 (it was about 7:45)and we had not given Russell any of his meds yet. We have to hold his meds when we do blood work. We called our nurse clinician, who thought this was a splendid idea, and she gave us a requisition for the blood work. So not only do we like giving our son recreational drugs...let's stab him in the arm for good measure. Sometimes I really wonder about our sanity. So now we have a date for our third try at the heart cath. May 14th...hopefully things will go smooth but I guess we have learned to expect the unexpected. I guess this is one of the reasons that its hard for us to think long term. Everything in our life seems to be in a state of flux. We always get these curveballs thrown at us. In many ways we feel we are passengers in this life; certainly not in the driver's seat. Maybe there is something to be learned there.