Ok, so Trish had picked up something from the kitchen counter and felt something "pop." She didn't think much of it at the time, but her arm started to hurt a few days later, so she went in to see the doctor. The doctor gave her an ice pack and a sling, took an X-Ray and sent her home.

The next day, we come home to two frantic messages from the doctor's office. They say that Trish has to call them right away. Ok, she picks up the phone and calls them. They're not there; the answering service tells her she'll have to call tomorrow (so much for having to call them right away). No big deal... we'd rented Far From Heaven (Which is amazing, incidentally... if you haven't seen it, you really should) and settle in for a long evening.

Of course, halfway through the movie the phone rings. It's a resident at the emergency room wondering why Trish hasn't called back. "She's got a broken wrist!" he says. "She has to come in right now! The Orthopod is waiting for her!"

At this point Trish is mistified... They didn't X-ray her wrist; they X-rayed her arm. We look at each other and shrug, then head to the ER.

We get to the ER at around 10pm. No one knows ANYTHING about Trish' broken "wrist." There's no Orthopod waiting... the resident who'd called wasn't even there. We end up sitting in treatment room for four hours. At about hour two, Trish says to me, "If this is about my elbow, I'm going to be really steamed!"

You see, Trish broke her arm when she was six years old. She was trying to prove she could swing higher than her friend, and she did... right until the point she fell off. Her mother took her to the doctor in Pocatello, ID, who set the arm. After the cast came off, however, they found that her elbow had been dislocated. "Don't worry," says the kindly old Idaho doctor, "we'll just wait until she hits her full growth, then re-locate it."

By the time Trish had reached her "full growth," however, it seems that Medical science had changed. "We can't relocate her elbow now! We'd have to re-break her arm!" The upshot is that she's had a dislocated elbow ever since (technically, it's the radius bone which is dislocated... but what the hell. It's easy to say "dislocated elbow."

You can see where this is going, can't you? Sure enough, at about hour 3.5, the on-call Orthopod confirms that Trish's broken wrist was actually the dislocated elbow. Apparently, whoever looked at the X-Ray didn't bother to read her chart. We ended up spending four hours in an ER for absolutely no reason. Period. We were giddy by the time we got home.

Told you it wasn't that exciting in hindsight... but you want to know the punchline? They still billed our insurance for the visit, and the insurance company still has to pay them... even though NOTHING was done and there was no reason whatsoever for the visit to have occurred.

This must be why we have the "best healthcare system in the world," right?

Ok, you can close this window and go back to the main weblog now...

-Harold