So my dad broke his leg... again.

What's funny about it is I know exactly what he was there to do, so I have a pretty good play-by-play of what happened tonight. Somehow, it came up in conversation over dinner what he was doing tonight. It was an odd case in an odd location, so everything about tonight has been strange. First of all, he had to open and close, but not actually perform a surgery himself. A neurologist had to perform spinal surgery on a patient from the anterior (read: "front"), because a POSTERIOR entry had somehow been rendered impossible. What that basically means is, someone (i.e., my dad) had to open the body up and essentially move all the guts out of the way so the performing doc could get at the spine. Also, dad was doing this at Glendale Memorial in a strange twist of events, which is a place he basically NEVER does cases. So already, this was a very strange one for him.

Anyway, he's about to open like he's supposed to, but somehow, while moving the patient, he managed to be on his knees by the slab. One of the docs in there managed to step on dad's leg while he was in a kneeling position, and crack.

But he was able to get his bit done, at least, so the neuro doc could get to work while they blitzed dad to imaging to X-ray his leg. Sure enough, it's broken. That's when he calls my sister to tell her the happy news, saying he needs his moon boot for support, as well as his walker and wheelchair. So my car's all out of gas and we didn't have time to stop, so we hijack my mom's car and put the equiment in. Now, we weren't sure exactly how sneaky we needed to be, so we both got our badges (my employee badge and her RN student badge), and I found a Glendale Memorial scrub shirt that didn't fit me. I gave it to Julia for some extra James Bond disguise factor (just in case security didn't acquiesce to our request to rescue someone who was saving someone's life. People can be stupid.)

We motored. Fortunately, we didn't HAVE to be spies, but we were worried that we might. But we made it to the reception desk and security made a quick call. They sent us on up. Anyway, we delivered the package and saw dad. He was okay, and didn't appear even to be in any pain. He just wanted his moon boot for support. As soon as he got it on, he hobbled back to OR on his walker like it was no big thang. So Julia's there with him now, and I came back to pick up Ray. Now we're just waiting for him to finish up.

Creepy parallel to my own life: the first and second times he broke his leg are like the first and second times I broke my arm. The first time was due to the breakee's own stupidity and while dad broke both legs, I broke both bones in my arm. The second time was someone ELSE'S fault for knocking the breakee down, and only ONE thing was broken (my dad's worse leg, my radius).

Spooky.