Tentacle Check

So... we wound up making a visit to the emergency room Wednesday night. Basically, Beautiful Wife came down with something over the weekend, and whatever it was seems to have set off some sort of rash on the front of her torso, right around the areas where she'd had her surgery. Now, the most recent surgery was back in December, so this wasn't anything directly to do with that, but still... worrisome. Especially as one area was hot and swollen -- almost hardened -- and painful. 

So, we went to one of those Quick Care places (which turned out to be more like Eventual Care, but never mind that now). And we waited. 

Time has no meaning here...

When the doctor finally came in and saw us, he basically took one look and said, "You should go find an emergency room where they can do a proper CT scan of that thing. I'll call ahead and let them know you're coming." Which he evidently did, and it saved us some time on checking in. 

So it was... maybe seven o'clock? ...when we headed down to the hospital where Beautiful Wife had gotten her surgery, and where they'd have all her records. And then we checked in. And then we waited. 

And then they took some blood and moved us to another waiting room farther inside the building. 

And then we waited. 

Eventually they got us into a room. 

And then we waited. 

Finally, Beautiful Wife got looked over by a couple of doctors, and we explained the whole thing and our concerns, and they agreed that they needed to do a CT scan to see if this was something just on the skin, or if there was a abscess or something happening deeper down. 

And then we waited. 

The secret to waiting in a hospital is to come prepared. I hadn't, exactly, but we had phones and Kindles and some chargers and a plucky, can-do attitude... and also, I managed to cadge a dry-erase marker off of one of the nurses.

So we managed.

It's important to make sure the doctors understand your concerns, after all.

So, we did eventually get the CT scan and we did eventually get the results from the CT scan, and the doctor on duty and the plastic surgeon who happened to be available looked them over and concurred that we could go back home and deal with this with oral antibiotics. There wasn't any sort of abscess, and even more reassuring they found absolutely no evidence that my wife was growing a tentacle out of her belly. 

But it was still three in the morning by the time we got home, and Thursday was -- understandably -- a day when not a whole lot got accomplished.