Waiting A Little Longer!
It’s a busy time in our household as we near the end of the school year for the kids! I’ve been trying to get to this post for a bit now but every time I try something comes up. I have to say it’s been rather frustrating because it isn’t just a five minute job in putting a post together. With my CRPS everything seems to take double the time to do especially writing. No more excuses I just have to pound this out and get it done. My pain continues to be up and down at the moment with no sign of when I might be having surgery to fix my upper implant. It’s frustrating really because I was hoping to have had the surgery before summer but it’s looking more like fall now because everyone knows that surgery slows in the summer!
As I mentioned before I keep getting distracted from trying to put this post together and the phone just rang a few minutes ago. It was surgery scheduling getting back to me after I had called them this morning. The disappointing news is that the wait sounds like it will be around another 4 to 5 months before they get to me. Let’s just say that my heart sank a little knowing that I have to wait even longer now. I am on the cancellation list however so I hope I get called sooner rather than later. Surgery wait times are suppose to be getting better in our country, where they are trying to get a patient in for surgery between 3 and 6 months after agreeing to surgery. If I end up waiting another five months I’ll be at almost a year I had to wait. That doesn’t really fit into their target times does it!
What do you do though because there are people just like me who’ve been waiting just as long as me and so I have no right to complain. You just have to take it all in stride and do the best you can until the call comes in with your scheduled date. When speaking to the person doing the scheduling I had sympathy for her in doing a job that I wouldn’t want. Every day she has the task of telling people like myself who call “sorry you have to wait just a little bit longer for your surgery”. I think as the patient we need to step back and no matter how disappointed we are with having to wait, understand the difficult job they have at hand. It’s not her fault that there aren’t enough surgeons or that there isn’t enough time in the O.R. They are doing a tough job and too often people call them up yelling at them about how long they’ve waited!
I know that we are frustrated by the long waits but we need to have a little understanding and that they are doing the best job they can do. It’s your local government that needs to be lobbied to make a difference. Let the people doing the ire job do just that, they don’t need us making the job any harder believe me. I’m not saying not to check up with the person scheduling surgeries I’m just saying that when you do, go into it with a little compassion for the person on the other end. Find out all the facts first before you get upset! Our pain sometimes gets the better of us and sometimes we want things now. That isn’t always possible and there are other people out there just like you and I who are in fact worse off believe it or not. Who knows someone needing a new heart might have been scheduled before your surgery. There are reason that we may not necessarily know that others get scheduled before us. This isn’t always the case but I just want people to think about that.
So just like that this post has been written! It wasn’t what I’d planned on writing but it was something I felt I needed to talk about because too often we complain. I don’t want to be that person. I can be disappointed but I don’t want to be that person who complains and takes it out on others!