Reconsidered

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds...
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson

I am a huge fan of Joy's primary care doctor. He specializes in special needs, and really seemed to "get" Joy, from the very first visit.

We had a pre-op appointment this week in advance of Joy's scheduled hernia surgery. Actually at the time we scheduled it, it was going to be for the combined scar-reduction & hernia surgery, but in the wake of the insurance company's decision to deny the scar-reduction, we had settled on doing just the hernia surgery. This was our first chance to talk to Joy's primary care doc about that decision.

He was properly appreciative of Joy's amazing developmental explosion. He was also on the ball with a thought that hadn't occurred to us -- that when one of his patients with special needs has a surgical procedure under sedation/anesthesia, he likes to take the opportunity for a blood draw and test all those levels that you don't get a chance to do without quite a bit of trauma otherwise.

But then he told me that he wanted us to think very carefully about our decision. The hernia is really tiny, he said -- it had made sense to fix in context of the other (now cancelled) procedure, and given JoyDad's hernia history he'd still back us up if we decided to go ahead. But to him, it didn't seem that the hernia posed a serious issue, and certainly not an imminent one. We can always continue to monitor it, and decide on surgery later if it seems to be getting worse. And -- here was the kicker -- he asked us if we were sure we wanted to run the risk of interfering with Joy's recent developmental trajectory right now.

If there's one thing we don't want to do, it's torpedo all these amazing gains. We'd thought about that angle, but hadn't perhaps taken it seriously enough.

So, we've cancelled the surgery. It's kind of a relief to have such a fine reason to reconsider.

Thanks for all the positive thoughts!