My day at the hospital

Yesterday I spent the whole day at Primary Children's Hospital.  

No worries.  All is well.  It's just that one of my twins is a hemophiliac so he had to meet his new group of docs--his social worker, his physical therapist, his hematologist, etc.   

What a cool place, Primary Children's is!  

I get the same charge walking the halls of a hospital that I get walking the aisles at Borders. They both give me that sense that if I look hard enough, I'll find my grail.  

Plus I'm pretty sure when Gad's not at church he's either at Border's or Primary Children's.

You can feel him there even in the parking garage. When I was searching for a place to park, I looked down one of the rows and there was a Polynesian man motioning to me that there was an empty stall right across from him. Trust a Polynesian to look out for a haole girl like me. I gave him the shaka and did the hula for him, then he did the slap dance and gave me a peace out.

It's cute registering as an outpatient at Primary Children's because there is this little knitting lady who sits behind the desk.  She lives in her own little knitting world, but if you just stand behind the desk and smile at her and giggle a little bit she will eventually see you and realize she's at work and not back at the workshop with Santa and the elves.  

(I've been to knitters anonymous myself so I have a lot of compassion for knitting addicts.)

After we registered we went up to the pediatric hematology/oncology unit to wait and wait and wait our turn.  We read Dogsong by Gary Paulsen and made a dog paper bag puppet and talked about how much my son was going to die if he didn't get a dog soon.  

And then suddenly it was our turn.  The nurse practitioner burst into the room and said "ARE YOU READY TO HAVE SOME FUN?" 

We just blinked and shrugged. 

"BECAUSE WE ARE SERIOUS ABOUT FUN IN UTAH!"  she said as she stuck an otoscope in his ear.

I asked her if she needed a sidekick and she said, "NO, I don't.  This is MY act," so I only said ba dum bum under my breath. 

The physical therapist was next.  She won some hoity toity national awards last year so listened carefully to everything she said.  She recommended an orthopod for my son's limb length discrepancy, which she said was most likely caused by the bleed on the left side of his brain when he was born 12 weeks early.  She said he may need to get his long leg stapled so his short leg can catch up.  

"Couldn't we just paper clip it?" I said.  "Or tape it?  Stapling just sounds so invasive." 

She just stared at me like she was doing a crossword puzzle. 

"Or could we glue it?" I said. "I just bought a whole bunch of glue sticks at Costco."

Okay, she may have won some hoity toity awards from "the man," but she sure isn't very creative. 

That's all I'm sayin. 

After it was over my son and I walked down the long hall of children's artwork and said "OMGOSH!  This one was made by a six year old!"  Then we ate cheeseburgers and fries in the Rainbow Cafe on the first floor and drank little bottles of Coke.  (I hate Coke, but I lub little bottles.)  

Then we talked about cancer and gave air hugs and kisses to all the little kids with baseball caps and face masks that made us wish it wasn't such a wonderful, yet terrible-horrible-no-good-very-bad life all at the same time.  

I'm going to go bake a pie now.