A New Hope

Yesterday was spent in furtherance of the saga that is John Dear's painful feet (as previously discussed here). While I feel cheered by what Super-Special Orthopedist told us, JD has (somewhat characteristically) responded by going into Fit of Depression (Melodrama Remix) - Track 2. But, I'm getting ahead of myself.

Super-Special Orthopedist is in Town Far Away, so after dropping off The Boy at day care (to JD's grumblings that we didn't have to do so), we left Hometown with a little over an hour to get there. I figured that the trip would take 45 minutes, so we were good to go.

Good to go until we were compelled to drive through a monsoon and several traffic snarl ups. This was the middle of the day so I had figured that traffic on the way to and in Town Far Away would not be bad. We plan, G-D laughs.

I had JD call the office when we were 15 minutes late to let them know we were on our way (we were probably 15-20 minutes away at that point). This message was given to the voicemail, not an actual person (that's important).

We finally get to Super-Special Orthopedist's office and guess what? They have no record of JD's appointment and no record of JD at all! My guess is that JD had called around to get the earliest appointment available with one of the Super-Special doctors in the practice and that when JD had found the earliest one, and said to make the appointment with Super-Special Orthopedist, the staff either didn't register that or JD thought he said that when he actually didn't. Does that make any sense?

The point is, is that this kind of hooey happens all the time with JD. There's always some kind of mess up, screw up, story or explanation. JD plays all "why does this always happen to me?" Sometimes, I just want to hang my head and say "have you ever thought that maybe, just maybe, you might have something to do with it?" Luckily, I have practiced patience and not said that or any of the variations of that statement to JD.

He knew that I was mad though, but I just explained, "look, I'm not mad at you, I'm frustrated with the whole situation." Which I was.

Anyways, Super-Special Orthopedist and his staff were able to fit us in with only a short wait. After Super-Special Helper and Super-Special Orthopedist took a few pokes at JD's foot, they said, "Oh, this is classic flat foot. No problem, we do an operation where we fuse the bones in the back of the foot together, realign the foot, no more pain." Well, they said more than that, but that's the gist of it.

So, we have a plan and a date for surgery. Super-Special Orthopedist recommended some things to do prior to the surgery and said if those work, we may be able to push the surgery off for awhile. At this point, I'm willing to do anything if we can get JD out of pain.