Tag: medicine

Ow

On By Luther M. SilerIn lifeLeave a comment

In retrospect, I should have kept the tooth, or at least gotten a picture of it. I did ask to see it, and I was surprised at how small it was for some reason. One would think I would know how big my own teeth are! I do not.

That said, despite finding out that I was also scheduled for a filling on a tooth that I had thought the doc said we were just going to keep an eye on, the procedure was quick and more or less completely painless. I want to say something like “the shots were the worst part,” but the shots weren’t even enough to qualify as bad, since they start with numbing gel anyway, so I barely felt them. The drilling for the filling (heh) seemed like it took less than a minute. There’s been no pain post-removal, at least not yet. I’m supposed to be super religious about soft foods for at least another couple of days, so hopefully nothing dumb is going to happen between now and then.

One weird thing: we very nearly had to cancel the extraction because of my blood pressure. I also had a doctor’s appointment this morning, and my blood pressure was a reasonable 120/83. The first two readings in the dentist’s chair, despite me not feeling either especially nervous or, really, any emotional or physical symptoms at all, were an absolutely insane 173/120 and 171/123, both of which are alarmingly close to get to the hospital right now levels of hypertension. They did the filling and tested me again and it was down to 136/87, still high, but not what the fuck high. It’s crazy to me that my blood pressure can get that high without me feeling any particular sort of way while it’s going on, but had it hit that a third time they’d have had to reschedule me with an oral surgeon who could put me completely under instead of doing the extraction in-office.

Weird.

I’ve spent the majority of the day since getting home blasting through Dungeon Crawler Carl VI: The Eye of the Bedlam Bride on my Kindle; I’ve probably read over half of it today and I’m getting progressively more and more angry about how fucking good this series is. It’s absolutely unfair that something this ridiculous has this much emotional heft to it. Somebody should be in jail. It doesn’t have to be anyone affiliated with the book, as I doubt Matt Dinniman could finish the series from behind bars, so we may have to pick someone else. The President, maybe.

In which my day is expensive and needley

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy1 Comment

I managed to hit a parked car in my own fucking driveway this morning.

We have, for lack of a better word and in the interest of not telling a long story, a Tenant in our house. She’s been here for several months. She parks her car in the driveway every single morning. Because our garage is currently packed full with bullshit, my wife has also been parking in the driveway. I am on Fall Break, as all of you know, and for some reason when I left my house for a doctor’s appointment at 7:50 this morning, the fact that my wife’s car was not in the driveway made my fucking brain short-circuit and I assumed that that meant the other car was not in the driveway either. I realized my terrible mistake about half a second too late, and I don’t know yet how much my fucking idiocy is going to cost me.

To the doctor’s! Where I received a hepatitis B shot (needle #1) and had blood drawn (needle #2) so that my A1C could be tested. It’s 5.7! The diabeetus is officially Controlled! I can go off one of my many medications now!

Seriously, one of these days I’m going to take a picture of the pile of fucking pills I ingest every night. It’s ludicrous.

I also had to fill out the questionnaire about my mental health that I have to fill out every time I go to the doctor since I’m on brain meds. I was honest on the depression scale, but I handed the anxiety scale over to the doctor and told her flat-out that I was lying on it. Why? There’s a fucking election in two weeks, and my anxiety is off the scale but not in a way that adjusting my meds is going to help. We’re gonna leave those alone, and in about two weeks I’m either gonna be fine or I’m gonna need a prescription for fucking strychnine.

I mailed the postcards.

And then I went and got my second tattoo (Needles #3- God, who knows) in two months. My appointment started at 11:00 in the morning and I wasn’t finished until 4:15. My arm fucking hurts— this was easily the most painful tattoo (and the biggest, and the most colorful) I’ve ever had, and you can see from all the open pores at the bottom of the image that my arm isn’t terribly happy with me. Hummingbirds were my mom’s favorites, though, and I absolutely love the design. Griffin Freehling at Enamored Arts, LLC does great work. But holy shit, I need to not spend any more money at all for the rest of my break.

Blech

On By Luther M. SilerIn lifeLeave a comment

I slept like absolute shit last night and I’ve been alternating between nauseous, dizzy and chills (?!?) all day. God, the second day after Mounjaro sucks.

At any rate, I’ve got nothing for you today, so feel free to talk amongst yourselves.

In which I’m not dying

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy2 Comments

Another “not much going on” day, and if I wasn’t sure it was summertime before, the way I can’t find anything interesting to say about anything very well might be the clearest evidence I’ve seen yet.

Oh, wait, I do have something.

So, yeah, I don’t have liver cancer.

Not that I really thought I had liver cancer, but it’s been a possible-but-not-especially-likely future that’s kind of been floating over my head for the last few weeks. I had a liver ultrasound in May to confirm that some bloodwork abnormalities were because of fatty liver syndrome(*), and the ultrasound found a lesion on my liver. This is one of those “this is common, and not a big deal, but we’re going to check it out in case it’s a big deal, because if it’s a big deal, and it’s not a big deal, but if it’s a big deal it’s a big deal” type of things, where it’s almost definitely not liver cancer but hey dude, uh, go schedule a CT scan just to be sure?

I don’t know if you’ve ever had a CT scan before. I hadn’t, so I went in kind of not knowing what to expect other than that I was going to be fed into a large doughnut-shaped machine. They’d told me not to eat for four hours before the procedure, but as it was at 8:25 in the morning, that wasn’t a challenge. What they didn’t tell me, and I’m not sure if this is the case for every CT scan or not, was that I’d be on an IV briefly during the procedure, so I probably should have had a gallon of water or so before going in. My veins are utter bastards under the best of circumstances– I have grown used to telling people trying to draw blood to go directly to the back of my hand and not even to try the crook of my arm– and “slightly dehydrated” is not the best of circumstances. Two people, four sticks, and the bruises on my arm right now are impressive.

At any rate, the IV was to feed something into my veins that would dilate them to make them show up more easily on the scan. NBD, right? I was impressed at the length and detail involved in their explanation of what I was going to experience during the “minute to a minute and a half” that the chemical was going to be active in my veins. Namely, everything heated up, starting with my ears, which were abruptly twenty degrees warmer than the rest of my body, followed by my face, and then everything else.

I was warned that I might think I was wetting myself, and guaranteed that I was not. I was also warned that I might feel like I had an erection and that that also would not be happening, and my immediate and complete crackdown on the urge to make some sort of terrible joke made me kind of proud of myself. At any rate, I didn’t really experience either, although I can kind of see how people might feel like a spreading pool of warmth in their lap might be alarming. The sensation in general came right up to the edge of unpleasant and then receded as quickly as it came, and then I was done. I had the results this afternoon; I have a “tiny,” their words, cyst on my liver, perfectly normal and either highly unlikely or actually unable to turn into anything alarming.

(I am unsure, and I’ll talk to my doctor about this, if this is something I should keep an eye on in the future, or if I have, as my wife put it, “a new liver friend,” but they’re definitely not worrying about it now, and I can stop mentally appending “… so long as I don’t have liver cancer” to every discussion of anything happening in the future.)

Oh, and then once I was done the nurse went to take the blanket off of me, and abruptly stopped and said “Wait, do you still have your pants down?”, which, yes, I do, because lady you can see my hands, and I did not use the muscles in my ass to pull my pants back up, so … gimme a second, here. I also refrained from wisecracking at that, so I genuinely deserve some sort of prize here for my restraint and class.

(*) They were. This is also not especially alarming, although I need to do some reading on exactly what it means other than that my liver is as fat as the rest of me.

Dr. Lawrence Curry, DO update

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocyLeave a comment

This was kind of an annoying week; I spent way more time than I usually want to trying to get people to call me back who were manifestly refusing to do what I wanted. I’m trying to give people money to mow my dad’s lawn and no one wants money. I tried to cancel a doctor’s appointment, discovered I could book an appointment but not cancel an appointment online, called and was told by a recording to leave a message, and no one called me back. I left messages with various denizens of the city I live in for various other reasons. Very little luck.

So, Dr. Curry. I went back on the 31st and checked his office out again. This is its current condition:

That’s taken through the window, which gives you a sense of the current security level of the office and how guaranteed it is to be broken into by someone looking for drugs in the very near future. I took more pictures, but all of the rest would require some level of image manipulation to hide people’s names and addresses and shit, because there are documents with people’s Social Security numbers on them sitting in the windowsill.

While I was standing in the lot, another car pulled in. It turned out that the driver was the mother of another of his patients, one who also had spent time trying to convince their family member to stop going to this guy. Unfortunately, her daughter in this case is not only on Medicaid, which makes it difficult to just pick up and switch doctors, but she’s also on a thyroid medication that she can’t currently get her prescription renewed for. Because no one can get ahold of this fucker.

Again, this situation is literally going to end up killing someone. He has a lot of elderly and Medicaid patients. (This makes the “no insurance/$50 a visit” thing on his door even worse– if you’re on Medicaid, it’s because you don’t have fifty bucks to toss at the doctor every time you go.)

I found an article from several years ago that suggested that at that time he had “over 6,000” patients, by the way.

I went to the nearest pharmacy, just for the hell of it, and they told me that as far as they knew he was still practicing but that his hours were limited to “between six and eight in the morning.” I told the pharmacist that the lobby had been cleared out and she seemed surprised by that; apparently they’ve seen him relatively recently, so I very well might just drive over there at seven on Monday and camp out in the parking lot for a little while and see if anyone happens to drive by.

Dr. Curry also had an FNP working for him. She has also disappeared. She’s considerably younger, so I have to assume she’s going to turn up somewhere with another job? I’m still trying to find her. She’s got privileges with a hospital south of me but it’s not like you can call those hospitals and find those people; that’s not how it works.

I also called the local newspaper and a couple of lawyers. One called me back and explained that he couldn’t help me. One has not. The newspaper guy called me back and said he was treating the situation as an action line situation, where they just help out readers with shit, but that he was looking into things and would get back to me if he found anything out. I haven’t heard back yet, which I’m choosing to not treat as sinister just yet.

We’ll see what Monday morning has in store for me.

In which I’m not there yet

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocyLeave a comment

If you have never seen someone wearing a CPAP mask, be aware that it is impossible to overstate just how completely fucking ridiculous they look. Prince couldn’t look cool in one of these fucking things. Bowie couldn’t look cool in a CPAP mask. It’s just impossible, and it’s driven home by the fact that if you Google the masks you get a bunch of pictures of attractive people and models and they still look completely ridiculous– none of them are dressed for bed, and critically, none of them are giant, hairy fat men, which by my understanding are the main clients for these things, as our bodies are tired of us and thus try to strangle us in our sleep.

Anyway, you might be wondering why I haven’t given an update for the CPAPpery yet, and the reason is that I haven’t got one to give. I’ve got my machine, but the mask they sent me … isn’t working. At any size. It is absolutely impossible (I’ve said that a lot in this post already, but it remains true) to get the mask they sent me, at any size, to seal properly– my unit will work for no more than five to ten minutes before stopping because of a “major airflow leak” and tell me to reattach my hoses, which have never been detached and do not have any holes in them, nor are they attached improperly.

We’re trying a different mask of another style, one that is close to the diagram to the right but I think doesn’t feature the idiotic top-of-the-head air tube attachment, and I fully expect to find out when that gets here that there’s something wrong with my machine. Looking forward to it, even, because when you try three different versions of the same mask with three different people, two of whom do not have beards, and remain entirely unable to achieve a proper seal even once, it’s probably a sensor issue somewhere and not the mask’s fault.

I get the new masks on Thursday next week, supposedly, because they are apparently being sent by camel. I feel like given that the insurance company is already hassling me for “noncompliance with my therapy,” which I currently can’t do because my shit doesn’t work, and my respiratory therapist was supposedly going to take care of this exact problem, they maybe could have shipped the equipment faster. Maybe just, like, a guy, on foot. He could have gotten it here before next Thursday, I’m certain of that.

Anyway, if I ever get to attempt to sleep in one of these things, I’ll tell you all about it. It hasn’t happened yet.

On that sleep study

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy6 Comments

I didn’t write about the sleep study on Sunday like I meant to, mostly because it kind of ended up fizzling as an entertaining story, but a couple of people have asked me about it from Real Lifetm so why not. The thing I was most prepared to be annoyed about was that I was expecting to be told to go immediately to bed upon returning home with the equipment. I believed this because 1) when my mother had a similar trial many years ago they wired her up and told her to go straight to sleep at, like, 7:30, and 2) my doctor told me that was what was going to happen. Sleep at 7:30 simply wasn’t going to be possible, so I was looking forward to many hours of laying with my eyes closed in a not-especially-dark room (we have, in 12 years of living in this house, somehow not managed to acquire curtains for all of the windows in our bedroom) and just … existing.

I made sure I was done with caffeine for the day before noon, which is not normally my move, and tried to be a bit more active than usual, hoping that Tired would set in, and indeed I did manage to elicit some yawns while I was driving to the hospital at, oh, 6:30 or so. I had three different shirts with me because I wasn’t clear about my instructions and didn’t quite know whether they were going to be putting any sensors directly onto my skin or, conversely, wanted to avoid putting sensors straight on my skin; instructions to wear a “button-up shirt or a pajama shirt” seemed slightly contradictory, especially for someone who sleeps in a pair of basketball shorts and nothing else on all but the coldest nights. Sleeping with a shirt on was going to make the whole process even more complicated.

Anyway, it ended up all not mattering; the most interesting parts of the actual wiring-up bit were 1) taking my picture, both from in front and profile; 2) measuring my neck for some reason; 3) having to sign a form stating that if I broke or lost any of the equipment I was on the hook for $5300, I hate you America; and 4) discovering that not only did the shirt not especially matter (I went ahead and wore it, because the nurse suggested the straps could get uncomfortable, which seemed reasonable) but that I should go to bed at my normal time. This was mostly good news, although it meant I had to sit around my house all evening with the equipment on.

I did not take any pictures with the equipment on, by the way. I thought about it and then looked at what the straps were doing to my man-tits in the mirror and … nah. I love y’all but not that much. Here, if you want to see me looking ridiculous, check out this post-LASIK picture.

The actual equipment: a nasal cannula with a little attachment that hung down over my upper lip, both designed to determine whether I was actually breathing; a pulse oximeter attached to my left pointer finger; two elastic straps, one around my stomach and one around my chest, both to measure how much they stretched and contracted as I breathed through the night, and a sort of control box that strapped to the center of my chest and I don’t think actually did anything on its own. I suspect the pulse oximeter was probably the single most important part of the system, as I feel like watching that for eight hours will provide sufficient evidence of whether I’m breathing properly in my sleep or not. Either way it’s going to be a couple of weeks before I hear any results, assuming that nothing disappeared after I put it into the drop box at the hospital the next morning.

Here’s the problem, and yes, I’m an idiot, you don’t need to tell me: I really don’t know if I can wear one of those fucking masks if they decide I actually do have sleep apnea.

I am, and again, I know this is stupid, deeply paranoid about people being able to see me when I’m asleep. I was always the last one to fall asleep and the first one to wake up at slumber parties, and even now with a wife and child, one of whom is in the bed with me every freaking night, I can occasionally be weirdly twitchy about it. And while being asleep around my actual family isn’t much of a thing except on my worst anxiety-melting-my-brain nights, the notion that I might have to be asleep around other people while wearing that ridiculous-looking getup on my face offends me at a deep and primal level. Like, this shit is pre-rational; pure lizard brain. I can’t manage it. I’d literally rather have surgery (and yes, there’s all sorts of paranoia about anesthesia, too, but at least that’s only once) than have to wear that damn mask every night. Surely there’s something they can cut open or cut out or put a stent into or something like that? C’mon. Plus, I’m a stomach sleeper, and granted the whole reason I started pushing for this test in the first place was that if I try to sleep on my back I stop breathing, but I’m pretty sure strapping a 2-1B mask to my face is going to make stomach-sleeping pretty Goddamned uncomfortable, and the idea is that I can sleep however I want, not that I trade one way I can’t sleep for another way I can’t sleep.

Sigh.

At any rate, I’ll let y’all know when I know something.

That time again

On By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching1 Comment

This year’s big innovation in classroom design is a couple hundred feet of Bluetooth LED lights that I bought from Amazon for like $19 a roll or something. I have decided that this year I’m in a secure enough financial position that I’m not going to worry too much about how much I spend to outfit my room; I know all the arguments about why teachers shouldn’t have to spend money on this shit (and, believe me, I’ve argued from the other side as often as from mine) and this year I don’t care. I’m gonna be spending eight hours a day in there and God damn it I want the place fun and comfortable. The lights can be controlled from an app on my phone and can cycle through a billion colors or something; I really only need eight or ten so we’re all good there. I don’t know how often they’re going to be on, necessarily, but they’ll be a fun option.

I’ve spent a good couple of hours over the last few days talking with the new principal, and while early emails raised a whole lot of red flags, nearly all of them have been put to bed as soon as in-person conversation became possible. I still have no sense of my assistant principal, who is a very quiet person. Honestly, in a lot of ways, the AP’s job is more important, as the AP is the one who handles discipline. You need an ass-kicker in that role. I am not getting ass-kicker vibes. But we’ll see. Two major “not important in the grand scale but a big deal to me” tests were passed; teachers do not have a dress code and I am not going to be expected to submit lesson plans, provided that I’m actually teaching, which is not going to be a problem.

Two more weekends and we’re back. I have an at-home sleep study tomorrow, have I mentioned that? It’s because my eye doctor thinks I have sleep apnea, a sentence that is 100% true and I have no intention of providing further explanation for. I’m expected to arrive at the hospital at 7:00 PM, where they will hook me up to a bunch of wires and diagnostic devices, then go home with all that shit attached to me and, at, oh, 8:00 or so, depending on how long it takes, go directly to sleep. Which, hah. I’m thinking about getting up at, like, 5:00 in the morning tomorrow and then not touching any caffeine after noon just in hopes of a chance that I’m not tossing and turning in bed all night. I’m pretty sure I’m not supposed to do any of my usual wind-down shit either; I typically read for at least half an hour before bed and … well.

I’ll tell y’all all about it on Sunday.