I confess, Wednesday felt like a VERY long day to me. And I’m not the one undergoing cancer treatment. Productive, sure, just long.

Jacob and I were out the door a bit late in the morning but I got him dropped off at school. Then I had to send a message to the school to let them know that he would be leaving early for an appointment. Good boy, I thought, I did it. But I should have sent it to MYSELF too as a reminder. I had originally thought, multiple times, that I would go to the school, pick him up, go to the appointment. Easy peasy lemon squeazy. Except of course that would mean pulling him out around 2:30, which is right in the middle of a period, which is preceded by a break, so the best time was actually to take him at 1:40. Do you think my brain could register that “tweak” to the schedule? Nope. I said, “Have a great day, see you at 1:40” and then POOF, the idea vanished from my conscious mind.

I spent the morning at work in meetings, got a bunch of stuff going that I’ve been working on, felt a bit pressed but productive. I did a very late lunch, closer to 1:00 p.m., and then like I said, completely forgot I was picking him up at 1:40. At 1:43, my phone beeped with a text from him. “Panda?”. Oh, riiiiiiight. I grabbed him 10m later, it’s not that far, but still. Sigh.

Okay, back home, he could hang out for 30m while I did some more work, drafted some emails, got a jump start on a file for later in the afternoon, and then time to go to the doctor’s office.

2:50 p.m. was the supposed appointment time. It was our first session with our new family doctor for something that has been bothering J and while we have an appointment for a full entry physical in April, we didn’t want to wait. Jacob has 3 or 4 issues at play at the moment, and this is the one he wanted to tackle first. Hence the appointment rather than a drop-in. At 3:35 p.m., i.e. 45 minutes after the start time, I asked the nurse if it would be much longer. Now, maybe that doesn’t seem like a long delay. And if it was at an AppleTree clinic with walk-ins, sure. Or perhaps for a specialist at a hospital with consults or emergencies, sure. Or a specialist who uses the terrible “block booking” approach.

But he’s none of those things. This is a GP’s office, no walk-ins, appointments only that day, and running almost an hour late. And of course, when people arrived, they told us NOTHING about how backed up his schedule was. I talked to Jacob and he was tired of waiting too. We agreed to give it another 15 minutes, to take us to the full hour, and then we were going to bounce. It also doesn’t help that it’s a small cramped waiting room shared with another doctor, full of SICK PEOPLE, crying babies, and people talking on cell phones, etc. With the annoyance too that it is all paid parking that expires, but at least there’s an “app for that” and I could just click “extend”. I didn’t care about the cost, just the logistics.

Plus we were already stressed … okay, at least, **I** was already stressed about Andrea at the hospital … but they took us in finally within that time. Then we had to wait, saw a nurse, then finally him, etc. It was about 1h 10 minutes late to see him, in the end. We’ll have to make sure future appointments take place earlier in the day with the hope that the backlog will not be as long. Regardless, nothing earth-shattering for Jacob, pretty much what I expected, and next time we’ll follow up by phone. Okay, that won’t be too bad, I hope.

On the way back, we had to head over to the store to pick up pre-ordered groceries. However, I apparently should NOT be trusted with both making the list AND ordering. Normally Andrea does the list first, and I submit the order, but I did both, and ended up ordering a TON of food! Doh!

Back home, close to 5:00 p.m. but I had some work to finish up from earlier. So back on to the work computer, plowed through some stuff, and pulled my head out in time to figure out Andrea was likely to be spending the night, we (J and I) could go visit, but only until 8:00 p.m. Ack!

Let’s see — 5:50 p.m., a couple of emails to send, but no time. Leftovers in the fridge? No time. Jacob and I piled into the car at 6:00, rushed toward the hospital, grabbed McDonald’s so we could eat and drive at the same time, and got to the hospital around 6:30, checked in, up to the room around 6:45/7:00 p.m. Whew. With another bag of stuff that she had asked me to bring (delivery #3). I even remembered ALL of it this time. Except I took the wrong heating pad.

The plan was that we would hang out for an hour or so, maybe play a game. But the cub, who had said he was doing “fine” all along and seemed to actually be doing okay, went running towards Andrea as soon as he saw her and only wanted to cuddle for the first 45m we were there.

But he’s our good luck charm. After 2.5d of waiting to hear SOMETHING that looked like a plan, they finally decided that she should meet with the respirology team (I’m exaggerating only slightly, as it seemed very gong show-ish to figure out who even knew what the options COULD be). However, there is now a plan in place for “something” to happen on Friday. The specific choices are up to Andrea, but they FINALLY had options to offer and timings to boot!

I felt fortunate to be able to be there for the conversation too as she had generally been on her own for 2 days with no real movement on treatment options. But Jacob’s lucky presence worked well … the team showed up, presented options for Friday, and also gave Andrea the option of discharge-and-clinic on Friday or stay-in-house until Friday. Andrea opted to be “sprung”.

♫ Freedom’s just another word for they’re not doing anything else for her… ♫

Now, what it will exactly look like on Friday is anyone’s guess but it was a relief to have her back home. And Jacob felt the same (plus her too, obviously).

Which isn’t to say I didn’t also have two loads of laundry still to do, a few more emails for work, Jacob’s lunch for today to make, and a dishwasher to empty and refill (I punted that until the next morning). Seeing Jacob’s relief at seeing her at the hospital, and to her being home, I did put the idea in his head before he went to bed that if he did feel a bit overwhelmed for today (Thursday), he could consider a mental health day. Which he took. I suspect part of that was for me too — if he’s not at school, I don’t have to transport him, making my start and end of day for work that much easier. 🙂

It was a very long but productive day yesterday. I did manage to squeeze in some “me time” with an app I’m enjoying on my phone (Trainstations 2), a bit of DuoLingo that I started doing again, and reposting some old book reviews to my PolyBlog website instead of PolyWogg. I even watched an hour of TV late last night after Andrea and Jacob went to bed so I could decompress.

Friday will be a long day too but we will keep Jacob in reserve as our good luck charm if we need him to wrangle the universe for us.