Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

A stressful day that ultimately worked out. Got x-rays, got thingie notarized. X-rays came on CD (film printer broken, but they said they've sent CDs to this orthopedist before and he can read them ... gee, last time I was x-rayed it was old-fashioned film-developed-in-wet-chemicals (not that old-fashioned, as it was high-speed film with the booster in the film-holder -- what percentage of a 1970s x-ray is the radiation exposure of a modern x-ray?)). Alas, I can't see the pics on the CD. Seem to be in DICOM format, but free DICOM tools I downloaded won't read them and I can't get the app on the CD to run; found a few tools supposed to convert them to jpg/png/bmp/etc., but get "I can't read that JPG because it's 12-bits deep and thaaat's not staaaaandard" complaint from display tools like Eye-Of-Gnome when I try to convert. So much for sneak preview of what the doc will see.

Hate having appointments scheduled first thing in the morning; not just the stress of getting up and out of the house early enough when I'm not a morning person and my body's unreliable, but also interacting with doctors when I'm even more achy than usual and guaranteed to be fuzzy-brained. But the orthopedist is only at this office one day a month, and the only opening that had was 0900 (which seems odd to me, as most other people seem to like to get appointments out of the way early, leaving the afternoon slots for folks like me -- I hope it's not "everybody show up at nine and wait to be gotten to".). Of course, after the reasonable-weather week we've had (yeah, some rain in there, but all liquid that I noticed) we have a winter storm warning for the morning. No idea what the odds are of that screwing up my plans. Guess I'll find out come morning.

At least a big hunk o' stress is lifted because I managed to do what I needed to do to be ready for the appointment (now I just have to wake up in time -- think seven and a half alarms will do the trick though (one is too quiet to really count)). If the weather gets in the way one way or another, I'll be quite frustrated, but at least it won't feel like it's because I screwed it up. Here's hoping the weather isn't as bad as the folks on the telly made it sound, or that it holds off long enough to not get in my way. I've been wanting to get this thing treated since July, and the fact that it hasn't healed on its own in that time is scaring me.

Had hoped to have already been asleep by now. It seems I'm not (or I'm making surprisingly few typos for posting this in my sleep). Let's see whether I can get my brain to shut down for the night in the next half hour.