We Have a Date

[Here is James talking to Grandma and Grandpa on Skype. He's quite the technologically advanced baby.]

We have a date for James's intestinal reconnection surgery: May 7. At our appointment with the surgeon today, he thought everything looked good, and in fact, he would have been willing to schedule the surgery in April. I wanted to wait until the semester was done, though, because James will have to be in the hospital for an estimated 7-10 days for his recovery. I'm going to want to be there as much as I can, and I don't want to have to worry about anything else during that time. (And if anything, waiting longer is better from a surgery perspective, although it sounds like that month or so won't make too much difference one way or another.) The surgeon mentioned that there were a couple of different options for reconnection procedures, but he won't know which one they'll do until they're actually in the operating room and see what things look like. It seems like they do all of them fairly regularly, and the kids have good outcomes, so that's encouraging.

(Our surgeon does his operations on Fridays, so in May our other options were either the boys' birthday or Mike's birthday, and I didn't really want to pick either of those!)

James also had an ultrasound appointment today as well, to make sure his testicles were in the right place (they are, but the doc wanted to be sure before the surgery), and to check on his kidney stones (we don't know the results there, but we assume we'll get an update from the nephrologist at our next appointment or before). We have had our share of problems with Radiology (I haven't had a chance to write about my complaints about the MRI appointment, but suffice to say that whoever gives instructions to the patients perhaps should communicate with the people who are actually doing the procedures), and today was almost no exception. We showed up and they only had one of the appointments in the system. I told the receptionist that I had watched the person upstairs put the second appointment into the computer, and she said it wasn't there and that I needed to get orders from the doctor. So I was headed upstairs to try to find that doctor (who does appointments on Thursdays, so I was pretty sure that was going to be a lost cause), and I was (perhaps too loudly) saying to Mike that I knew this was going to happen, I knew it was going to get messed up (we showed up early for exactly that reason), when the receptionist said she'd call back to the techs and ask if the second appointment was on the list. Well, lo and behold it was. So we were able to get everything done despite the initial confusion.

[Another new post is up, under the videos below.]