Long Trip Home
Breakfast was those Pop Tarts we bought outside Glacier.
I got a call about a half hour before we were going to heat back home from a care provider at Mom’s wound care clinic. She had left me a voice mail the day before when we were off the grid. She had received the report from Mom’s urologist and wanted to make sure I’d gotten word of the results and had her follow-up appointments lined up. I explained that we hadn’t heard anything except the probably unreliable summary Mom had given me.
According to what she read to me from the urologist report, there was no “growth” in the vagina. Instead, the urologist wrote that my mom wasn’t aware that she had a pessary in her vagina. I do know the doctor had a foreign name, and Mom has trouble with accents. I can easily see that, with my mom’s poor hearing and confused state, she didn’t hear him correctly and thought he asked if she knew she had something she couldn’t understand in her vagina and she said no. She has been obsessing over getting the pessary removed for a while now, and for years she had been dealing with cleaning it, so I know darn well she is aware it is there.
Anyway, the urologist was referring her to a surgeon because of hernias she has had for a long time, a hiatal hernia and an umbilical hernia and also to see if anything can be done about her belly button, which is back to oozing pus (and to see if the surgeon detects a urachal cyst or anything like that). It is good to know at least that it doesn’t seem there’s anything growing in the vagina!
Checkout time was 10:00, which was too early to drive straight to the airport in Bozeman, so first we stopped to get coffee at McDonalds in Anaconda. Then we had…an early lunch at a Perkins restaurant in Butte! We’d passed signs advertising it and said if the opportunity arose, we had to eat there. We’d never been to one. My cousin and her family used to go to a Perkins in Memphis all the time, and I used to tease her that they must be amazing. I had first heard of them in college when we’d had to do a case study of a Perkins franchise for a business class. They’re a diner very similar to IHOP. When we arrived, I texted photos to Memphis cousin and also Kirby Hall, who took the business class with me.
I had delicious chicken noodle soup that hit the spot, with my cold. Also a tasty patty melt that I couldn’t quite finish.
We still ended up at the airport three hours early for the flight, which then ended up being an additional hour and a half late. Half the passengers had connecting flights so they were routed to gate agents to rebook on other flights. We had enough time for me to buy a chocolate bar with huckleberries. They only grow in the wild and are native to that part of the country, which is why you don’t see them much in other areas.
Curmudgeon and I had seats next to each other. The plane was less full than it would have been, now that a lot of people with connections had to book other flights, so I turned to the man next to me and told him I had a cold and suggested if he was bothered by this that he might relocate to another seat. He commiserated and said he was okay with it. (I was kind of hoping Curmudgeon and I could have the half-row to ourselves.) I learned later that he was a pilot from Waco and had traveled to Montana because he taught as a flight instructor at a university there and commuted back and forth to Texas.
With the flight delay and having to cool the house down after we got back (we’d picked a good week to be out of town), we didn’t get to bed till after midnight.
I got a call about a half hour before we were going to heat back home from a care provider at Mom’s wound care clinic. She had left me a voice mail the day before when we were off the grid. She had received the report from Mom’s urologist and wanted to make sure I’d gotten word of the results and had her follow-up appointments lined up. I explained that we hadn’t heard anything except the probably unreliable summary Mom had given me.
According to what she read to me from the urologist report, there was no “growth” in the vagina. Instead, the urologist wrote that my mom wasn’t aware that she had a pessary in her vagina. I do know the doctor had a foreign name, and Mom has trouble with accents. I can easily see that, with my mom’s poor hearing and confused state, she didn’t hear him correctly and thought he asked if she knew she had something she couldn’t understand in her vagina and she said no. She has been obsessing over getting the pessary removed for a while now, and for years she had been dealing with cleaning it, so I know darn well she is aware it is there.
Anyway, the urologist was referring her to a surgeon because of hernias she has had for a long time, a hiatal hernia and an umbilical hernia and also to see if anything can be done about her belly button, which is back to oozing pus (and to see if the surgeon detects a urachal cyst or anything like that). It is good to know at least that it doesn’t seem there’s anything growing in the vagina!
Checkout time was 10:00, which was too early to drive straight to the airport in Bozeman, so first we stopped to get coffee at McDonalds in Anaconda. Then we had…an early lunch at a Perkins restaurant in Butte! We’d passed signs advertising it and said if the opportunity arose, we had to eat there. We’d never been to one. My cousin and her family used to go to a Perkins in Memphis all the time, and I used to tease her that they must be amazing. I had first heard of them in college when we’d had to do a case study of a Perkins franchise for a business class. They’re a diner very similar to IHOP. When we arrived, I texted photos to Memphis cousin and also Kirby Hall, who took the business class with me.
I had delicious chicken noodle soup that hit the spot, with my cold. Also a tasty patty melt that I couldn’t quite finish.
We still ended up at the airport three hours early for the flight, which then ended up being an additional hour and a half late. Half the passengers had connecting flights so they were routed to gate agents to rebook on other flights. We had enough time for me to buy a chocolate bar with huckleberries. They only grow in the wild and are native to that part of the country, which is why you don’t see them much in other areas.
Curmudgeon and I had seats next to each other. The plane was less full than it would have been, now that a lot of people with connections had to book other flights, so I turned to the man next to me and told him I had a cold and suggested if he was bothered by this that he might relocate to another seat. He commiserated and said he was okay with it. (I was kind of hoping Curmudgeon and I could have the half-row to ourselves.) I learned later that he was a pilot from Waco and had traveled to Montana because he taught as a flight instructor at a university there and commuted back and forth to Texas.
With the flight delay and having to cool the house down after we got back (we’d picked a good week to be out of town), we didn’t get to bed till after midnight.