The "pallative care" lead doc today might be one of the few people I've met who could use a phrase like "I'm here to help empower the choices you make" and not sound absurdly pithy. It was like he knows it sounds corny and cliched and catch-phrasy but that it's also as good a one-sentence explanation of his role as anybody came up with. And him knowing how it sounds kept it from feeling hollow when he said it.

I mentioned previously here (I think) her having some knee pain, prelim diagnosis elsewhere saying arthritis. Instead of having the handy ortho doc on the team just look at her knee & poke around today (which he did), he also mentioned some kinda roller device thing, whipped out his phone, showed it to her on Amazon, and then found a YouTube video showing how it worked.

It felt real, practical, useful. It put meat on the bones of the whole "here to help" speech that we were given. And you felt like maybe they might deliver in a tougher scenario down the road some time, or at least that they might actually TRY.

That's something I've felt very little of from them during this whole past few months. M.D.s have been damned good at Emory as usual, the rest of the interactions we've had this time around I'm MUCH less complimentary of.

But tying that back to my comment about coping with good news. We're still learning how to function in our new three month increments.

I KNOW there's other people here who are much farther into that process -- something I just typed with fucking tears in my eyes if you want some blunt truth about -- but we're still trying to figure it all out. Emotionally, psychologically, we're barely toddlers about that, still a good bit away from taking anything resembling steady steps.

In the past week I learned that a) she'd been waiting to make her reservation for some DAR/historical/something conference later this year until she knew if she'd be in some kind of treatment, and b) that she'd already picked up a few Christmas gifts for some friends, just in case she wasn't in a position to be doing any shopping later in the year

That's the stuff I'm talking about having to learn. Just figuring out how you deal with the way this all changes how you look at everything. You do it, but it's a mindfuck when you realize that you're doing it.

The tie to the knee pain thing? The doc that's the team lead asked her something like "what are you going to do with the time between now & your next scan?" She answered something like "live my life, try to not think about the next scan until about two days before, and then worry like hell until I'm on the other side". Doing a couple things she wanted to do, like that conference thing, are easier without so much knee pain so he tried to see if they could help with the knee pain, or in other words "helping empower the choices she made".

As skeptical as I was about that half of the two separate appointments today -- mercifully they were on the same floor of the rather sprawling campus -- I have to admit that it does make you feel a little better knowing that's the guy in charge of pain management down the road if/when that becomes needed.