Habtamu had an osteochondroma removed from his right leg last September. It is all healed and he has not had any problems from it since. We had known about it for a couple of years. It is the source of one of my finest parenting moments. Not. He'd been complaining about his knee hurting and swelling up. I'd been telling him to toughen up, in so many words. Finally I took him into the Dr who took one look/feel and said "Oh yeah. It's osteochondroma.... that probably hurts." D'oh.
We had a lovely Christmas in Florida with the Gardners.
Day after we got back, Yordanos broke her collar bone at soccer. Some things I didn't know about broken collar bones: if the person is young enough, the broken parts of the bones will send out bony tendrils and reconnect and grow together and remodel over time. Yordanos was right on the edge of this age and it didn't look like it was growing back. At her recent checkup, however, there was definitely bone connecting the two pieces! In adults, the broken bits will be held together by scar tissue, basically, and will not have the new bone growth.
Then in March, Habtamu had an emergency appendectomy. Is there any other kind? It didn't burst, but it laid him low for awhile.
The morning before he had appendix out:
Just got the bill for the appendectomy... the hospital charged insurance $50,000. Are you kidding me? We could go round in circles about how wrong this is, and all that is broken in healthcare... But literally, people are one appendectomy away from financial ruin. We were still paying for the osteochondroma, so I called to set up a payment plan for the appendectomy. They were kind enough to tack it on to the end of the first bill. So I said, "Ok, so basically I will just keep paying indefinitely..."
Now I've got to get an MRI on my knee. It's been a-hurting for awhile, and I finally went in to the kids' Ortho. See above issues to understand why we have our own Ortho Dr. now.
