Here's to indecipherable medical jargon

Well thanks to some indecipherable medical terminology, I find myself back in the proverbial hot seat. Dr. Re, my kind-hearted neurologist, hasn't been able to say whether my MRI shows any new growth or not--something about around the edges of the resection cavity. He said it could be "insert technical mumbo jumbo here" or it could possibly be necrosis, but he wasn't fully able to say, "no sir there's no tumor."

So he sent the Radiologist's notes up to John's-Hopkins, and hopefully, they'll be calling me back in a few days with their own thoughts on the matter. They'll probably want to see the original scans which I'm fully prepared to send them. Most important though, is that I keep myself from freaking out this whole time.

You see, hospitals operate in two worlds. First is the urgent world of medicine where everything should happen smoothly, flawlessly and painlessly. Everything also happens exactly one day in the past in this world. So as soon as a Doc orders something he/she comes to find out that it did in fact already happen yesterday. The second world is the REAL world where things get lost, people get pissy because they were up all night arguing with their boyfriends or wives, scheduling errors occur more frequently than should be permitted and so on. Necessary events and procedures occur exactly two weeks after they should. So when the Doc says, "You should've had that scan yesterday," it actually happens two weeks from yesterday.

Since the real world tends to rule the roost in hospital land, I'm actually probably going to have to wait about two weeks before I even hear anything from these folks. Well, I guess it's time for some of those mental conditioning exercises all those religious leaders have been going on and on about over the last several millenia...