Maybe Some Relief

So, I know I've been on about my dad, but he was... better, Sunday. Maybe only in the short term, and only in limited ways, but better.

But Secondborn has an inguinal hernia, possibly congenital, and the damned thing... it's there, but it hides when we try to have doctors look at it. I mean, the pediatrician could identify it. The ER staff couldn't find it at all by the time they finally tried to scan for it (and initially sounded very dubious that the pediatrician could have made the diagnosis without getting an ultrasound, but eventually confirmed that with the symptoms we described it really couldn't be anything else). So yesterday, Beautiful Wife finally managed to get the child into his appointment with the pediatric urologist.

The plan was that she would take him in for the initial appointment, and I would be at work as usual (which, y'know, at some point does need to happen). But after the second phone call of the morning, and maybe two hours of actually being at work, it was completely obvious that Beautiful Wife was completely (and understandably) freaked out, and right on the edge of melting down.

I explained the situation and went home.

So when we went to see the doctor, we all went to see the doctor. And we probably looked like we were on safari, or waiting for the apocalypse. I had The Backpack -- the one in which I keep my laptop, my kindle, all my chargers, a bag of allergy meds, a toothbrush, a first aid kit, a sewing kit... it's kind of my work bag, but it doubles as an overnight bag or a go-bag. Beautiful wife had her pack, which she carried in lieu of a purse because it's easier to transport papers in a day pack. Secondborn had his Kindle Fire to play on, and Firstborn had packed the Nintendo Switch and several games, along with his Kindle. But we honestly didn't know how long this was going to take, or whether they would send us immediately to surgery or not be able to find anything and look at us like that was because we were clearly insane.

And that was the other reason I came along: in my experience, doctors are much less likely to blow things off if they're described by a man. And since we didn't know this doctor...

Well.

The appointment went swimmingly, by which I mean exceedingly well. Secondborn wasn't showing any extrusion, but the doctor was able to get him to clench up and show us exactly where he could see the hernia. (Suck it, Emergency Room.) He described how this sort of thing happened -- possibly a congenital weakness in the wall of the abdomen from when the testicles first extruded, possibly related to Secondborn's perennial constipation (which he was able to show us via the ultrasound), or possibly some combination of both. Then he described the minimally intrusive surgery it would require to fix it, and explained that once he'd made the incision he would run a microcamera over to the other side, to make sure there wasn't any potential hernia waiting to happen there as well; if there was, he would fix that, too, as part of the same procedure. (Apparently sometimes there are... indentations in the abdominal wall, that lend themselves to forming hernias.)

I'm having a little trouble describing how much of a HUGE FUCKING RELIEF IT WAS to have finally made our way to a doctor who essentially said, "Yes, I can easily see the problem you're describing, even though it isn't active right now, and yes, I know how to easily fix it and we're going to schedule that now, and in the meantime here's what to watch for and what to do."

Then he addressed the issue with Secondborn being constipated, and gave us an explicit To Do list so that we could clean out the blockage that we'd seen on the ultrasound and maintain a more... even flow of processing... from there. And the first big step of that -- getting the child to drink a full cup of magnesium citrate -- occupied most of the rest of the afternoon, but it's done and hopefully we're at a point where all this will finally just... be done.

Now, if we could just convince my dad to quit having strokes...