Four Weeks in the System, and One Woman Who Finally Showed Up

After four weeks in the hospital system — first the ER, then ICU, and finally a medical rehab facility — I was finally cleared to go home.

My left radius (that’s the forearm bone, for anyone who fell asleep in high school anatomy) had been broken near the wrist. And for reasons that still baffle me, the hospital refused to actually fix it.

I was scheduled for surgery over and over again — almost daily while I was in ICU. Each morning I’d get prepped, only to be told it was cancelled for some vague reason and “rescheduled for tomorrow”. Tomorrow would come, same thing. Cancelled. Rebooked. Cancelled again.

When they transferred me to rehab, they stopped pretending it was urgent and scheduled it “for next week”. Next week came, they loaded me into a van to transport me, and right as we’re pulling out, I get the call.

Cancelled. Again.

This time they tried to blame it on my defibrillator.

I reminded them — politely at first — that I had disclosed that detail approximately every five minutes since arriving, that it was in my chart, that they had literally acknowledged it a week earlier, and that it’s on file in their own damn hospital system.

Didn’t matter. I might as well have been lecturing the wall.

They offered to schedule it for the next day — the very day I was being discharged, the day I was finally going to leave the system after being trapped in it for over a month.

Absolutely not.

I refused. Hard. Then I asked for a referral to someone in Santa Fe who could actually do the surgery without playing calendar roulette.

When I got “home” — which really means Brittney’s place, since I still can’t navigate the stairs in my own house — the first order of business was making that appointment. And by some miracle, I got in the following Tuesday. The Tuesday before Thanksgiving.

I showed up. And finally — finally — a no-bullshit woman surgeon walked in. Let’s call her Dr. W.

From the second she opened her mouth, I could tell she was cut from a completely different cloth. She explained exactly why the break needed surgery, and how shocked she was that Albuquerque hadn’t fixed it immediately — because this type of break is one that always requires surgery, and right away.

She was competent. Direct. Human. Concerned.

You have no idea how refreshing that felt after weeks of being lost in the bureaucratic spin cycle.

She didn’t sugarcoat it: I needed surgery. I needed it fast. And time was the enemy of good results.

God, I loved her honesty. No games, no ego, no “let me check my list”. Just truth and expertise.

Then she asked if she could schedule surgery the next morning — clearly bracing herself for resistance, assuming I’d be traumatized by the previous cancellations.

Instead, I smiled.

Finally. Someone who solves problems for a living.

I said yes. If she could do it, I would be there.

And she didn’t fuck around. She scheduled me for 6 a.m. the next day. I showed up. She did her thing. And just like that — I had a wrist that wasn’t trying to fall off my body anymore. I had a hand I could actually use.

Plate. Screws. X-rays. Probably a scalpel. (Weird Al said it in a song once, so I assume it was involved.)

She was a no-bullshit, get-shit-done surgeon — and I respect the hell out of that.

After weeks drowning in incompetence, blind compliance, and a system designed more to sustain itself than to heal its patients, she was a blazing, unexpected glimmer of hope. A spitfire woman who walked in with competence, urgency, and zero ego.

She alone gave me hope where none had existed.