DAY THIRTY SEVEN

Brittany Darcy picked up the patient’s chart from the rack and looked briefly at it before opening the door to the treatment room. “Heidi Bowman, RAK.  Cancer victim.  Twenty two years old.  Amputation performed twenty-nine days ago.  She may be ready for fitting.”  She thought as she stepped into the room. Heidi and an older woman were in the room. 

“Hi.  I’m Brittany Darcy.  I’ll be checking your leg today.  We’ll see how you are progressing toward being ready for fitting with a permanent leg.”

Before she could say anything else the other woman interjected.  “This will be her last appointment here unless someone can explain why we waited for over two hours out there before they left us back here.”

“Two hours?”  Brittany looked at the chart.  The appointment was for 9:00 AM.  It was now 11:22.  Clearly something had gone wrong.

“Let me check her leg.  When we go out I’ll check the scheduling.”

“Well, if this is how you run the shop here Heidi will be going somewhere else.  And when I asked the girl at the desk she told me to sit down and wait.  I don’t expect me or my daughter to be treated this way.”

“Something went wrong.  We don’t schedule to be behind.  Sometimes we do miss it but we are rarely more than ten or fifteen minutes late.  We do get an occasional emergency and that throws out schedule out.”

“I can understand that.  But she told us we were early and the appointment was for nine.”

“We’ll check when we go out.”

Brittany helped Heidi take off her pylon and checked her leg.  “It is healing nicely.  We could schedule you next week for a casting but I don’t think that is a good idea.  I would like to see your stump shrink a little more.”

“How long?”

“Let’s schedule you for next week to check it and if it shrinks a little we cast it the week after next.  Let’s be positive about this let’s schedule the casting now too.”