Crippled Girl

You know what happens when you work on a bunch of things that all seem to take forever, and throw roadblock after roadblock in your face, just tempting you to quit?

Karma sees fit to put the finished product in your lap at about the same time.

In an about a week, I’ll be scheduling delivery for my new wheelchair. It’s been a (relatively) short process, taking about three months and three doctors appointments to get my insurance to approve the chair, which comes in at a whopping $26,000.  Insane, right? That’s more than my van will cost.

Speaking of the van, since I thankfully passed my driver’s test on the first try (even if it did take me 9 minutes to parallel park the huge van. My irritable PennDOT guy made sure to tell me exactly how long I took, since my snail-pace made him late for a doctor’s appointment. But I digress . . .), I have to head back up to the hospital to finish paperwork and to be measured in my new chair. Then it’ll be time to actually buy the van, which will sit happily in my driveway for a matter of 3.5 seconds before it’s hauled all over the country to be modified. And if the time frame that I’ve been told is actually accurate (hah, yeah right), the modifications should only take 6-8 weeks.

Hypothetically, that means there will be a summer road trip in the works. A girl can dream, right?

But, even better than a new chair and a new van, is the news I got on my answering machine three days ago: I’ve been accepted as a patient in the clinical research trial, and have an appointment scheduled in about 3 weeks from now. This is the appointment that will address and hopefully solve the previous genetic testing debacle that’s been going on for the past year.

You know, the one that claims I’m only crippled because I’m the product of inbreeding.

And while I’m terribly upset at the thought of giving back my white trash redneck of the year award, I am estatic to finally have the answers we’ve been searching for, for almost four years, by this point.

And to think, when I started talking to my MDA doctor about babies the year before we got married, I thought it would be a great way to get a jump start on the whole process.

Yeah. That one didn’t exactly pan out, did it?

Anywho, I don’t have much information, other than my appointment dates. For some reason, they have testing procedures done the day after your clinical appointment, and since we’re a 3-hour drive from the hospital, that means finding a hotel room. In one of the most expensive areas on the East coast. *SOB*  And, once again, because we live so far away, I can’t get to the hospital the night before, they want me at the hospital two hours before my appointment to get through admissions.

I’m praying I don’t have an 8am appointment. 8 am – 2 hours for admissions – 3 hour drive. You do the math on that one.

But, despite the stress of making sure we’re in the right place at the right time, I have a renewed feeling of hope that everything is going to work out. If the saying about nothing worthwhile in life is easy, then things have to end fantastically, right?

Fingers crossed, indeed.

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