Let me take you back in time a little bit. The date is April 25. My daughter is a mere 8 days old, and I'm offered the pretty remarkable opportunity of traveling to Italy for nine days with work as part of the Rome International Choral Festival in late June. At this time, it was a difficult decision. On one hand I get a free trip to Rome, on the other, I leave my new baby and wife for quite a while. Naturally, I consulted many people, including my wife, parents, and in-laws about what to do.
My wife and in-laws were all very excited about this opportunity for me, and encouraged me to go ahead and go. My mother, though, advised me in the other direction.
I chose to go, mostly because my wife really thought I should (maybe she wanted to get rid of me?) and it would be a good thing to do as I was also applying for a better position within our music department.
So I was set on Rome.
Fast forward to last Friday. Carrie is having bad pain in her upper abdomen during the day. It kind of comes and goes and then gets pretty bad in the evening. Without a fever or nausea, though, we decide to wait it out and things got back to normal. We also got an appointment set up for Tuesday morning so that her regular doctor could check things out.
Monday night, we visit ER. This one was bad. Fever, nausea, worse pain, etc. I drop Carrie off there, go back home to pick up stuff for Rachel, drop her off with some friends (thank you! thank you!) and go back to the ER in the rain, which by this point it POURING.
Doc thinks its a problem with the Gallbladder, so she has an ultrasound to check things out. Everything looks clean so she's sent home with happy pain meds and other medications.
Tuesday, she visted her regular doc (remember that appt scheduled a while back), who recommends a PIPIDA scan to further test the Gallbladder and its functioning. This is scheduled for Wednesday morning.
Attack number three occurs that night, and it naturally is after midnight, the point after which she is to have no medication, food, or drink. Awesome. She survives the night. The 8:00a scan, which should take about 45 minutes, she's told, ends up taking two hours because the radioactive stuff they injected her with won't enter the gallbladder. Even the technicians thinks that something is not good here. Scan is finally completed and results are faxed to the doctor.
Who we don't hear from that day.
Or even the next morning.
Thursday afternoon, after a couple of phone calls, a nurse tells us that they are recommending surgery and will call back later in the day with further info.
No one does.
We leave some polite, but stern messages and finally someone gets back with us the next morning (that's this morning). Nothing is set up, but we can set things up with these people if we want to. Gee, thanks, we would have done that 24 hours ago if we'd have known.
The earliest consultation we can get (and this is going with another surgeon entirely) is Monday afternoon. The earliest possible surgery is Tuesday, but we won't know anything until the consultation.
So what does this have to do with Rome? I'm leaving Wed morning. The odds are very good she'll be having the surgery while I'm to be out of the country, or at least be recovering with a newborn to take care of.
The good news is that both sets of parents are willing to come into town to help out (and I also got that job), but things have been, well, fun this last week.
I should have listened to my mother.
