What really matters

Anna finally had her twice rescheduled renal ultrasound and urology appointment last week. If you aren't familiar with big city hospitals, allow me to explain our usual experience. Appointment slots are double booked so we end up waiting and waiting and waiting some more and then Rich and I start sweating it out because we need to go to work and now it's an hour past when we said that we would be there. And then it starts getting close to lunch time for the little ones so you keep feeding them crackers and hope that you don't run out of snacks.

Amazingly, this was the smoothest set of appointments we've ever had, which figures since it was my day off from work. We had only been in the waiting room for about five minutes when they called us early for Anna's ultrasound. I was nervous. Really nervous. You never know when a problem is going to be discovered. That's why she has these ultrasounds.

The ultrasound started off well. The technician was young and kind. She easily found Anna's right kidney and began to record the images. She was comforting and told Anna how great she was doing. And then she moved over to the left kidney. It seemed to me, the non-medical professional, that she was having some difficulty and the images looked different to me.

Anna followed her requests to move, didn't fuss and was very well behaved for what was a slightly scary thing for her but the tech stopped telling her how well she was doing. After what seemed like forever, she finally moved to Anna's bladder and then took images of the kidneys from Anna's back. The first round had been from her sides.

We know the routine. When the tech finishes, she leaves the room to check with a doctor, who decides if the images are adequate. If there is a problem, the doctor returns with the tech to take more images. When the tech left, she said, "I'll be right back," which to me implied that she would be returning with a doctor. I held my breath.

But no. She returned to tell us we could head up to see the urologist. I felt a little queasy.

We were about 25 minutes early for our appointment but yet, we were called in to see the urologist a few minutes after we arrived. Unfortunately, we believe that he is close to retiring, which doesn't make me happy at all. I sincerely trust this man. He pulled up the ultrasound images and pointed to the first one. "See this kidney. This is a beautiful right kidney."

And then he pulled up another image. More breath holding. Afterwards, Rich told me that he was expecting the doctor to say that something wasn't right with Anna's left kidney. That he was setting up a comparison.

But no. Both kidneys looked great! Thankyouthankyouthankyou.

Little peanut was weighed (for an increase in her ditropan dosage) and she's up to 29.8 pounds.

So we are going to keep on keeping on. (We have a referral for another GI specialist.)

What really matters.