A healthy lack of obligation

This blog is not an obligation!

Funny how that happens, and funny how I say that now, after months of not obliging it. I'm changing my tactic. I'm not sure what it was before, but whatever it was, it wasn't working and is therefore now out the window.

In my inaugural non-obligatory, and perhaps also my final post (who knows! There's no obligation! Whee!) I am just going to blab about the day. Because blabbing about my mundane day is what I do best, yet I doubt I will ever feel a sudden obligation to do continue doing it.

Today's theme is Health Issues

Say "hi", Health Issues.

"Hi, health issues!"

This morning started with my wandering eyes noticing both a fire engine and ambulance in front of my neighbor's house. This, sadly, is not an unusual occurrence. K has both lupus and fibromyalgia, recenly had spinal surgery, is an veritable encyclopedia of medications and information on how to deal with sundry agencies regarding children with disabilities, and cracks me the fuck up.

Hell, K, is the first person to introduce my son to a low vision aid. Not one of the many eye docs we saw, not the school, not the state. My neighbor.

So, even though an ambulance shows up at her house several times a year, my heart skips a beat each time. You get used to it, but you don't. You wonder how big a punch her body delivered to itself this time.

I don't know yet :( because we had health issue of the day #2 to deal with.

- - -

This is more positive, if "no change" can be called good news.

Son was diagnosed a few years ago at age 11 with cone dystrophy. It is, basically, a loss of central vision that one is born with.

Now, that simple definition should have clued me in right away, but I need details, and get bogged down in web research even though each time I do it in this case, the results are the same: there is very little out there. The little that is out there indicates that it starts around the first decade of life, and can maybe possibly progress to complete blindness, but it's hard to say because it's a rare disease and there's scant data on it.

So, for a person who wants to understand so there are no real surprises down the road, it's frustrating as all get out. I could go on about those frustrations, but that's not the point today.

Today's point was that son was taken over the river and through the woods to a Univ eye clinic 1-1/2 hours away (because apparently that was how far we had to travel from home to finally find a doc who didn't call son a liar) and after the exam and visual field and retina photographing thingy, the result is that his visual acuity has held steady at 20/400 (20/200 being legal blindness).

It's good because it's not getting worse, and what I got a whiff of from the doc was that the longer he goes without getting worse, the better the odds that it won't ever get worse. He did add that it probably won't get better either, but I was never expecting that to happen anyway. Son already knows that he will have to keep being good to his sister if he doesn't want her to abandon her emphatic offer to drive him all over the place when she's old enough to drive. ;)

And there was a real nice aha moment today, too. Doc is great, but he is the fastest damned talker I've ever met. It's almost comical, as he speed-talk-dictates into his recorder and without missing a beat shoots a quick question at son, pauses all of one second to allow for response, then continues on. So having an assistant in the room at the end of the hours-long appointment was a big plus, as she was able to translate for me that which made me go, "aha".

We always thought this was something that progressed with him. His behavior indicated it. He never sat close to the TV, or held a book close at first. Then everything is pulled in a little closer and closer until we finally realize that something's going on. I always thought he could see fine when he didn't have things so close. But doc said (translated by assistant) that he wasn't moving closer because his eyes were changing, but because his need for detail was. In other words, as a toddler the details didn't matter.

Geez, I think about it now and it makes loads of sense. Pictures for kids are simple. Shapes are basic. Print is large. He didn't need to get closer because nothing out there demanded that he be able to distinguish small details. It was the demands, not the eyes, that brought him closer and closer to things. Therefore, the conclusion at this time is that his vision has always been 20/400 or thereabouts. Which is even more reason to think that it won't get worse, it just is. Which to me, is good news.

- - -

Perhaps the best part of the day, though, was the thing that isn't so directly health-related, but something I consider a huge part of what makes one healthy.

The guy at the front desk just made my freaking week. When we were all standing at the desk to check in, from moment one he addressed my son directly, as if it was the most natural thing in the world to turn to the actual patient to ask him to verify his address, phone number, etcetera. I say that tongue-in-cheek because it should be natural, but it's so rare that when it happens, you slap your head and wonder why, yeah why, do people direct questions not to the child patient old enough to possess language skills, but to their parent(s)? And even though you know that what this person did, which was to treat a child as a person, is what the norm should be, you still feel like handing him a blue ribbon or something for doing it.

Oh, and then when I went up to get my parking validated, he pulled out a box of chocolates that a resident brought back from vacation, took off the lid and held it out to me in offering. So I took one, looked up at him, and he just continued to hold that box so I could take a couple for the kids.

Gawd, I just love the little details, and the people that make a point of paying attention to them and injecting them into your day. That's what I call good for your health!