Fall Trip to Vanderbilt

We saw absolutely no color on the way to Vanderbilt this morning as the entire hour and forty-five minutes was driven in the dark.  We left the house a little before 5am...dark and early!  We arrived at the hospital around 6:40 for an appointment that we were supposed to be there by 7:10.  We used valet parking a bit differently this time trying to eliminate Woody having to navigate the long

hallway.  We first went to the hospital valet parking as the radiology department is right just a walk through the hospital waiting room.  He got registered for his scan and was told to head back to the scan waiting room.  He hadn't even gotten seated in that waiting room when they came to get him for his scan.  This is a quick scan since Woody can't have dye.  The attendant who walked him to the 

scan room came and got me when the scan was over so Woody wouldn't have to walk back to get me.  We headed out at the time we were supposed to have gotten there for the scan.  Clock work!  We reclaimed our car from valet parking and headed on around the block to the valet parking for the cancer clinic.  Woody signed in there and was shortly called to the registration desk.  The registration 

person asked the girl at the lab desk if Woody could go on in to the lab and they said, yes.  Again, saving him steps back to where we were seated in the waiting room.  And, once again, he was walking out of the lab about the time that he was supposed to be checking in for labs!  More clock work!  We headed across the hall and sat down in the big outer waiting room to wait to be called back to see Dr. Wyman.  At this point we were more than an hour early to see  the doctor so figured that this would be the point that we would wait.  We were wrong!  Once again they called him back immediately.  We saw Dr. Wyman when we were walking to the exam room so knew that he was on the premises already—a good sign!  He came in to see Woody almost immediately.  Come to find out the patients he was supposed to be seeing right then still weren't there so we helped by being early.  

Getting in so quickly meant that most results weren't back, though, the labs were back.  The main thing that Dr. Wyman mentioned were that his kidney function number was slightly higher than when infectious disease did labs some weeks back—a good thing.  He also mentioned that Woody as more anemic than he had been for a while.  Woody was due to have his anemia shot and B-12 shots today 

but we had to reschedule die to the Vanderbilt appointments that already existed.  He will go for those next week.  The anemia explains why it wears Woody out to walk very far with his walker.  He was so glad that he didn't have to walk the long hall today.  He said that he thought that he would have been late for his appointments if he had to do all that walking.  Valet parking really helped today.  We had never parked at two valet parking areas before.  But that worked very well.

Just a while ago, Dr. Wyman called with the scan results.  He said that the lymph nodes in the one place on his right leg were still enlarged, but that they think, as we do, that it has to do with his leg—both the infection that he had in his leg and that is still healing/having trouble with that leg.  Dr. 

Wyman felt that it would be okay to wait six months for the next scans.  That was what we were hoping for—less trips to Vanderbilt!

We were home by a little before 11am—a very short Vanderbilt day—but still quite a few hours—six 

hours either on the road or at appointments at Vanderbilt.  I think that this time there was more time spent on the road than at Vandy—Vandy was very efficient today for which we are thankful!

The prettiest leaves that we saw today were when we sat waiting for them to bring our car to us after all his appointments were over.  The bottom picture shows a pretty maple that we could see from where we sat waiting.  I snapped the top picture from the car window as we were leaving the Vanderbilt medical campus—the wall identifies where we had been and it shows that there is a little color around.  I did get a few more pretty pictures as we drove the back road route after we got to Murfreesboro.  We did have rain on the way home...one of the reasons that we got off the interstate.