Christmas is not far off
Christmas is not far off, and I should feel more in the spirit. The only thing that, at this time, tells me that Christmas is nearing is the Christmas tree I bought yesterday. The persimmons on the tree in the front yard don't count. They look beautiful, but they represent fall. Things are not made easier by the fact that we are meeting Erik's doctor next Tuesday. Erik's urologist is not one who'll mistake Erik's age by ten years; that has actually already happened. He does not invent out of the blue the diagnosis of cerebral palsy to cover his butt because he suspects that he didn't consider osteomalacia when he should have. But there are many others who have done that.
It's not enough that I get confused by the Kafkaesque situation produced by reading doctors' reports that have the air of Alice in Wonderland. Here no one fell down the rabbit hole, though. Nobody turned LARGER and then smaller. Nobody changed the notion of time the way the Mad Hatter did. No, all this is pure science. All the doctor has to do is state it and it comes true, as if what happened twenty years ago didn't weigh. Think of yourself as a doctor, and you have certain ambitions. What you do is follow you ambitions, namely that you strive to forage for feathers in your cap in a certain field, and pronounce that this or that person has Hurlers mucopolysaccharidosis. All the tests are done. When the results come in low and behold you notice that you are barking up the wrong tree. You don't keep looking up another tree to possibly see something much simpler like rickets. Oh, rickets is so dated. Rickets doesn't live here anymore. What if it's renal osteodystrophy. It sounds more important. You wouldn't do that. What you do instead is drop the patient like a hot potato and look for another undiagnosed something up a tree, and the real thing in the right tree is left all alone.
Erik is in a wheelchair because of that type of thinking. No wonder that so many mothers are turning to alternative medicine. I would do that if it could help. Unfortunately the internet and virtual searching came about 36 years too late for me.
It's not enough that I get confused by the Kafkaesque situation produced by reading doctors' reports that have the air of Alice in Wonderland. Here no one fell down the rabbit hole, though. Nobody turned LARGER and then smaller. Nobody changed the notion of time the way the Mad Hatter did. No, all this is pure science. All the doctor has to do is state it and it comes true, as if what happened twenty years ago didn't weigh. Think of yourself as a doctor, and you have certain ambitions. What you do is follow you ambitions, namely that you strive to forage for feathers in your cap in a certain field, and pronounce that this or that person has Hurlers mucopolysaccharidosis. All the tests are done. When the results come in low and behold you notice that you are barking up the wrong tree. You don't keep looking up another tree to possibly see something much simpler like rickets. Oh, rickets is so dated. Rickets doesn't live here anymore. What if it's renal osteodystrophy. It sounds more important. You wouldn't do that. What you do instead is drop the patient like a hot potato and look for another undiagnosed something up a tree, and the real thing in the right tree is left all alone.
Erik is in a wheelchair because of that type of thinking. No wonder that so many mothers are turning to alternative medicine. I would do that if it could help. Unfortunately the internet and virtual searching came about 36 years too late for me.
posted by Birgit Calhoun at 6:26 PM
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