A whole new medical experience

Week 18, 9 – 15 February 2012

As I got no information about how my spine was healing, I went to my GP asking her to help obtain more information from the Royal Hobart Hospital. She wrote me a referral letter to see a private neurosurgeon and called both the Launceston General Hospital and the Royal Hobart Hospital for all my scanned and x-ray images. The Launceston General Hospital provided a CD right away but not the Royal Hobart Hospital.

I had a phone conversation with the neurosurgery liaison nurse in the Hobart hospital and she said the neurosurgeon would dictate a letter for my GP about what she should do and the letter should reach her in about a week’s time. Again, no luck in getting more information.

On St Valentine’s Day, my husband and I went out for dinner.  When we returned home, we had a voice message in our answering machine.  The call was from the neurosurgery registrar of the Royal Hobart Hospital and he left a mobile number.  I called him back and he told me that I did not need to wear the brace any more.  

I found the conversation bizarre 怪誕.

"Who is going to take it off?" I asked.

"Can you not take if off yourself?" he said.

I said I would appreciate something in writing advising that I could take the brace off and what precautions I needed to take. He said I should avoid lifting heavy things, twisting 扭 my back, etc and my GP would receive a letter from them in a few weeks' time. I said I would like to have a written advice before the brace was taken off.

“I was told two weeks ago in Hobart that I needed to wear the brace for another 6 weeks,” I said.

This doctor is the young doctor I saw in Hobart. He said they had a detailed discussion afterwards with the radiologist without the neurosurgeon (I guessed he meant the consulting doctor I saw in the same consultation) and they thought that I could wean off the brace. He said new bones were growing and it was fine to take the brace off given that I had been wearing it for so long.

I then asked him what did he mean by "wean off" 戒掉 as this term all of a sudden surfaced? Then he asked about how many hours a day I was wearing the brace. I said: 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Then he said I could take it off during sleep for a week. This was not going to do me any harm. Then wore the brace for 8 hours a day for another week.

I urged him to put all these in writing. He said okay. But god knows when I would get the letter. (As it turned out, the letter arrived two and a half months later.)

He said as long as I felt comfortable, I did not have to wear the brace. But what if I don't feel comfortable? Whom should I turn to for consultation? Many told me that I would have a soft brace after this long hard one came off and I forgot to ask this doctor about the soft brace.

This is Tasmania!