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December 30, 2000
Back in Boston...
...yawn. Just woke up. Well, I woke up an hour or so ago, but since I've had hardly any coffee... maybe I should go make a fresh pot. Yeah, that's a good idea. Hang on... there. Coffee's brewing. All will be well soon.
I got home last night -- almost an hour later than I should have, because the bus was late. The bus I take from my mom's house leaves her town, and travels to Brattleboro, VT, where it picks up passengers from a New York bus. Yesterday, we arrived in Brattleboro, picked up the passengers from the other bus, and were on our merry way... until Keene, NH, where we ended up sitting and waiting for over an hour for a couple of people who were supposed to transfer from that New York bus, but apparently wandered off somewhere and got left behind. Now, call me heartless, but my thought was "Hey, you wandered off, you missed the bus -- that's your problem." Every time I've taken the bus (which I've been doing a few times a year since I moved here in '92) I've been told that if I'm not on the bus when it leaves, too bad. It would be one thing if those people were on a bus that arrived late or something, but they weren't. They had gone into the nearby gas station/convenience store. It's nice that the Greyhound people helped them out and all, but the hour delay caused problems for a lot of people on the bus I was on... like the woman with two small children, who missed her commuter rail train -- there were no more trains heading her way that night, so she was stranded. Or the kid whose parents were driving to Boston from the suburbs to pick him up. Or all the people who had to get to Logan to catch planes (I overheard at least two people on their cellphones, calling to discover that they'd missed their flights) or catch connecting buses elsewhere. I didn't have any problems like that -- I just had to hop onto the T -- but I still didn't want to sit on the bus for an extra hour...
So I was thoroughly grouchy when I finally got home. When I walked in, Smoke was so happy to see me, she ran around in little circles in front of me meowing like mad, then allowed me to pick her up and hug her (she hates being picked up. Hates it. Last night, she burrowed under my chin and purred, instead of doing her best to claw my face off. Aw). It was really cute, until I saw what she'd done to my bedroom. Holy crap. She's a small cat. Very, very small. How she made such a mess, I'll never know. Everything had been knocked off my bookcase and dresser -- there were CDs, books, videos, and papers scattered all over the floor, with an old blue ceramic dish I'd made in high school, and was using as an ashtray, shattered in the middle. (I liked that little dish, damnit!) She's yakked on my bed -- thankfully, on the sheets I was going to change that night anyway. Cat litter all over the floor. It was just a mess. I was debating whether it would be easier to clean it up, or just get a shovel and dump it all out the window. I decided cleaning was a better option -- after procrastinating by making a couple of phone calls. It's mostly tidy now -- I did as much as I had energy for, then took a shower, put the flannel sheets my mom got me for Christmas on the bed, and went to sleep. Those flannel sheets -- pure bliss. I may never leave the house again, my bed is so comfortable. Especially since Smoke insisted on being petted every time I so much as twitched during the night -- I didn't get much sleep, but hey, it's nice to know that you're missed when you go away.
My mom is doing better -- in spite of having a doctor whose head is so far up his own ass, I'm surprised he can even walk, much less treat patients. She saw him Thursday, for the first time since the surgery. (He'd been out of town while she was in the hospital, so he had no idea what had gone on.) I didn't go into the office with her -- I probably should have, but I suspect I would have punched him in the nose if I had, so maybe it's better that I waited outside. He told her it wasn't her appendix he'd removed -- surprise! It was the ligament that holds the uterus and bladder and all that in place. She'd torn it when she got the hernia, so it would have needed repair... but I'm thinking maybe just taking the whole thing out wasn't such a great idea. And anyway, shouldn't he have known the difference? i don't think I'd be too comfortable being treated by a surgeon who removes things without knowing what they are! From what my mom said, he was far too busy trying to cover himself, to prevent being sued, than he was in treating her -- he told her she'd overreacted by going to the emergency room, but backpedalled on that when she pointed out that the three doctors who saw her at the hospital agreed that something was very wrong, and that she needed to be admitted. He didn't tell her if the absence of the ligament is going to cause problems. He didn't tell her why she's been in so much pain. He just said he'd see her next week. I'm hoping she goes to a different hospital and gets a second opinion, because I don't think this doctor has any clue what he's doing. My theory is, he was hurrying through the operations he had to perform so that he could go out of town for the holiday, and so he didn't take the time to make sure he was doing a good job. I don't think contacting a lawyer could be a rash thing to do. I think he screwed up, in a big way, and now he's trying to cover his own butt. Gah.
End of rant -- for now. This whole thing makes me very, very angry... as if you couldn't tell. And now I'm going to go vent that anger by finishing cleaning my room... if I don't update before than, Happy New Year. 2000 sucked -- 2001 had better be an improvement. Oh, hey, and my birthday is in four days...
Posted by Mary Ellen at December 30, 2000 10:49 AM