2016—Replaced Left Shoulder

Dr Jonathan Donigan

…Previous medical event: 2015—“Health Insurance,” yet again!

By 2016, arthritis in my left shoulder had followed the pattern set by the right, and on February 1, Dr Donigan repeated the process from four years earlier, but on the other side. I’m still hunting for an x-ray image to display, but I suspect I haven’t preserved any.

This may have been the first time a surgery interrupted the hydrotherapy routine on which I’ve become substantially dependent. Or, indeed, it may have been the very intervention that led the physical therapist to send me to the pool. The record’s unclear, and my memory’s even less precise.

Next medical event: 2016—Cataract: Left Eye …

2016—Cataract: Left Eye

…Previous medical event: 2016—Replaced Left Shoulder

Chez moi, it would seem, interventions tend to proceed from right to left. By this time, I was a little more inured to the idea of ocular intrusion, but that’s just as well, because this routine, benign, beneficial procedure encountered complications, this time: fluids were leaking inside my eye, causing pressures to rise and threaten to cost me the sight of that eye.

We had to return after dark and disrupt Dr Hess’ dinner hour, as well as ours. When we apologized for that, his response startled a bit: something to the effect that “when one of my patients is in danger, dinner takes a back seat.”