My three-night say in the hospital — my second such admission in ten days — was coming to an end. During morning rounds, the hospitalist team pronounced me stable and said discharge would happen soon. Partially dressed and awaiting only the removal of my to intravenous needles, I eagerly awaited my departure.

Shortly before noon, the resident on the hospitalist team — the same person who had dismissed as a coincidence my precipitous hemoglobin drop (and blood loss) during the colonoscopy prep during my first stay — entered the room alone.

“We have the results of your CT scan from last night,” she began.

“Ok,” I said.

“You have a 7.6 cm by 5.6 cm mass at the head of your pancreas,” she continued. “The next step will be something called an EUS and biopsy to determine what diagnosis and treatment options.”

“Ok,” I replied. At that point, my son walked in with his lunch.

“Do you have any questions?” she concluded.

“I don’t think so,” I answered. “We’ll just take it one step at a time.”

“Have you eaten anything today?” she wondered. “I want to check with anesthesiology to see if they can do the EUS procedure later today. We’d like to have you stay in the hospital until you have it done.”

“What’s the point of staying here?” I asked. “Because of the mishandling of the camera endoscopy pack, we won’t have those results for another day, at least. There’s no way anyone will perform an endoscopy/biopsy today because I’ve eaten breakfast and started lunch. I’ll go home and come back tomorrow for the UES, if I have to. But nothing good is happening to me in this hospital right now.”

“I’ll check,” she responded.

A few minutes later, she came back to confirm what I suspected: I wouldn’t have an EUS until the following day, at the earliest. Later, she came back with discharge papers that scheduled it for a week later.

The delayed schedule was fine with me because I now wanted time to investigate and find the very best specialists to pursue the partial diagnosis (and whatever came next) that I had just received. I had numerous sources from which to develop that information and I used them all. I had one chance to get this right and I needed the best possible team — not just whoever happened to be the attending physician at the time set for an inpatient procedure.

“What’s up?” my son asked. I told him what I’d just learned and what would happen next.

A few minutes later, my continuity-of-care medical person — a third-year medical student — walked into the room.

“What’s your understanding of what you just learned?” he asked.

“I have a 7.6 by 5.6 cm mass at the head of my pancreas,” I relayed back to him. “The next step is to do a deep endoscopy, called an EUS, to biopsy it. After I get those results, we take from there.”

“Well,” he said, “that’s about as completely as I could have said it. Would you like to talk to a social worker.”

“No,” I said with a laugh. “For starters, until we get more results, I don’t have any idea what I would talk to such a person about. How about this plan: you help whoever is working on the discharge papers to get me out of here?”

There’s no place like home. Unfortunately, I wouldn’t be there long.