I'm back to not worrying after seeing the neurologist yesterday. The MRI never got scheduled due to severe stupidity on the scheduler's part. After getting off the phone with me on Monday, she seemed to forget about the whole thing until I called back yesterday to check on the progress. Then she tried to blame my doctor for her inaction, but it was completely her fault. It didn't matter anyway because the neurologist said to hold off on the MRI for awhile anyway and I've decided not to call the scheduler about this change just to see if she ever proceeds with getting the clearance from my insurance. My guess is that I never hear back from the MRI office. I'm thankful I didn't have an aneurysm or something similar while waiting on the scheduling ding-dong.
The neurologist was a trip. He was a character that you are more likely to find in a movie based on a John Grisham novel than in a real doctor's office. (If I had read a John Grisham novel I could have said he was a character from a book, but I haven't, but I did see the movie with Tom Cruise in Memphis and the Cayman Islands. I've totally forgotten the rest.) The doctor was older, had a soft southern drawl and was in an office that was several shades of dull brown and had not been updated since the late 70s. He did have a computer, but the old monitor took up two-thirds of his desk. When I walked in the waiting room, he was on the phone in his office on what sounded like a funny personal call (the other person in the line had screwed up their BMI calculation because they had their height wrong). He asked me into his office a few minutes later and began peppering me with questions about Bell's Palsy. Not "how are you feeling?" type questions, although there were some of those, but he quizzed me the history of the palsy, including when and where it was discovered, what precisely is it, where precisely it is (and this included a spinal model!), etc. I felt like I was sitting in a professor's office back in college. I had to be on my toes at all times. The doctor was slow, he would really think and consider each thing I said before moving on, which made my quiz uncomfortable. In the end, he told me I could pass the boards for neurology. It wasn't clear if this is how the doctor entertains himself or if he was testing my brain function. I'm just happy I passed, which is silly because I was not being graded, but it took my mind off of what he told me, which was that there is a direct correlation between the length and intensity of the pain and the length of the palsy. Basically, he thinks this is going to go on for awhile. After he walked me out, he went right back into his office for another personal call. Who does this guy chit-chat with all day long? I think the same thing when I see people constantly on a cell phone. Who could they be talking to so frequently?
On the drive home, I stopped at a y-shaped intersection down the hill from us. The traffic on the main street does not stop and where it forks off to the side, a traffic island was added over a year ago. There is a house at the point where the second street connects and the half-oval island is to prevent people from taking the turn too fast right in from of this house. The traffic island is painted with white stripes and it includes small plastic bumps and larger cement blocks, just like the ones found at the end of spaces in a parking lot. There is no mistaking this for an open part of the road.
As I stopped, I could see this old Oldsmobile flying down the hill, well above the speed limit, so I stayed stopped. Without signalling, the driver turned at the fork, cutting it really close to the house, driving over the huge bumps. It was an old lady wearing tan wrap around glasses (the kind old people prefer, they look like the ones handed out when you get your eyes dilated) who looked like she was riding a horse as she bounced around in her car going over the bumps at full speed. She looked over at me, with my mouth half agape in a palsied WTF look and seemed to frown, like I was the crazy one.
In other old person craziness, my great aunt has been telling my cousins that I have cerebral palsy. My mom has received some confused calls from relatives trying to figure out what is going on and why it took 36 years to diagnose cerebral palsy.
Today is the first day in about a week that I have not had a doctor or acupuncture appointment. I decided to relax over a bowl of cereal, but the Cheerios tasted awful. I bought a box of Frosted Joe's Os recently on a whim at Trader Joe's and I am hooked. Now regular cereal tastes boring, but I'm not going to further indulge the kid in me who was denied sugary cereals by my mom. It is a slippery slope toward a lover affair with Tony the Tiger.
