X-Ray Vision

“AWESOME!”

That was my 10-year old son’s reaction at 12:31 this afternoon.

No, we were not at Toys R Us or Cold Stone Creamery or even Costco.

We had just entered the X-Ray room at a local clinic to take pictures of his injured shoulder.

I thought, that he thought, the machine looked really cool, but later he admitted that he was just trying to have a positive attitude.

Wow, where did he get that from?

At around 10:30, I got a call this morning from my wife, a teacher at his school, that my son had hurt his shoulder playing a game called “Capture the Golden Egg”.

Once I detected that there was just concern in her voice and not fear, I reluctantly asked the question that any father of a future major league baseball player would ask, “which shoulder is it?”

Unfortunately, it was his throwing shoulder.

So I dropped everything I was doing -- actually I’m unemployed, I wasn’t doing anything -- and I called his doctor to make an appointment.

Thirty minutes later, I had picked up my son and we were being seen by the good doctor.

The doctor was encouraged by his range of motion, but he wanted to see x-rays, just in case.

We went across the street to get the pictures taken, but were told that they were not doing x-rays today.

Huh?

So, about 20 minutes later we arrived at their sister clinic where we were greeted by a sign on the closed door that had more instructions than an Ikea table.

The hours of operation on M,W,F were different than Tu,Th.

The lunch break one day is different than the lunch break on another.

With all the letters on this sheet, I felt like I was visiting an eye doctor instead of an x-ray facility.

When I finally figured out their schedule, I realized that their lunch had started seven minutes earlier.

Too bad it took me eight minutes to figure that out.

I searched high and low for Ashton Kutcher, but this was not a joke.

I knocked on the door anyway, expecting nothing, but surprisingly someone opened from the other side.

In the most successful three second pitch of all time, I spoke of our tour of the city and we were rewarded by them letting us in.

If only getting a job was that easy.

Then again, if I had a job, who would’ve taken care of my son?

We got the results back four hours later and were told by the doctor’s office that the shoulder was normal.

They also informed me that for some reason the clinic didn’t x-ray the clavicle.

That’s what you get for interrupting someone’s lunch.

Of course, this is Friday and they said that the clinic is closed on the weekend, so our only option was getting my son to the hospital.

I called our insurance company, to find out which hospitals were approved, my wife drove to get a new order form from the doctor’s office -- before they closed in 10 minutes -- and presto, chango, we were back in business.

After seven hours of phone calls and x-ray clinics, doctor appointments and running around town, the results were back and my son is going to be fine.

He’ll be in a sling for a week, courtesy of a minor separation in his shoulder, but the good news is he’ll be ready for spring baseball.

And that’s awesome!