In Which Our Heroine Is Once Again Strangled With Red Tape

Well surprise surprise: no scans happened today after all. It turns out the oncology nurse I spoke to on the phone Tuesday doesn't have the authority to reschedule new scans; the authorization has to come directly from an MD. So they sent me running all over the entire hospital for an hour this morning, where every department on earth met me with bewildered confusion. Nobody knew what the hell to do with me. But I persevered.

Somebody in radiology finally had the prescience to send me up to 5 North, the chemo ward, which has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with my situation at this point, but for some reason the chemo nurses seem to be the only people in the whole damn hospital who can ever figure out how to make the system work. Plus they're so wonderful! It's always a pleasure to go visit the ol' gang up there--I'm so inexplicably happy to see them, the beloved sadists who tortured me for six months. I believe this is called Stockholm Syndrome?

Anyway, sure enough the ever-knowledgeable chemo nurses figured out a way to reroute me over to the internal medicine clinic where, after a zippy three hour wait, I saw a resident who ordered CT scans for NEXT week. I'm just thankful they discovered the mistake BEFORE I had to drink the nasty ass drink.

Oh, and the IM resident examined my thumb and shrugged it off. She said it looks like a lipoma, but I'm here to tell you the nodule is very hard, not soft to the touch. So I'll ask an oncology resident to look at it when I go in for the results from my scans in two weeks.

Meanwhile, the mediport removal is still (theoretically) scheduled for tomorrow morning. I was afraid they would try to talk me into postponing it to make sure the scans came back clean, which would certainly be the sensible logical proper thing to do. I was ready to fight them tooth and nail though, knowing it would probably take anywhere from two to four months to get a new surgery appointment. But the resident just shrugged and said, "You should have had that thing taken out six months ago." Indeed.

So I'll be heading back down to Our Lady of the Damned bright and early tomorrow morning, fingers crossed, to beg them to yank it out once and for all. Place your bets now, while the pool's still open!