Upshot

At this point we were an hour and change into the appointment. We then battled our way through another grueling round of sitting. Mom was quite cranky after we had moved from the waiting room back into an examination room and sat a bit. I pointed out it had only been five minutes since we had been moved and then she truly had no aprreciation for waiting as she had missed LA.

Five minutes further and a nurse came in to double-check everything already completed to this point. In was a mere five minutes later that we met our doctor. Glorious cute doctor. Who proceeded to scratch his head and ask us why we were seeing him, as he is a sinus specialist, and Mom needs an ear specialist. sigh.

BUT

he did have a reasonable amount of good news for us.

First he went over the results of Mom's testing, which the technician had already done (to ease Mom's concern). After explaining that the problem was peripheral to the nerves, he looked in Mom's ear (otoscopic evaluation) and said the drum was intact.

At this point, I slipped into conversation that Mom had had evidence of broken ossicles on her head CT (advanced imaging). This, he said, could indeed explain Mom's hearing loss. After reviewing the CT report in the computer, he said it might be a fixable problem.

He gave orders for an appointment with a doctor specializing in ear canals. This doctor turns out to be the one who put in the ear tubes for Mom in January for her allergic ear disease. She likes him. Woo hoo.

The doctor then added on a temporal bone study to her follow-up head CT so that the next doctor will have everything he needs to plan a potential repair. Should Mom's ear problem be amenable to surgery, it sounds like it would be an outpatient procedure. Way less taxing than the orthopedic thing. Thank God.

Then it was just a wink until we were tucked back in at Stallworth, a mere two plus hours after we left.

Whew. We were both beat.

But it is definitely progress. And relatively good news. So we are going with that.