Thursday, August 8, 2013

Doctors & Mechanics



Have you ever taken your car in the shop for some mysterious noise you hear every time you drive it only to get it to the mechanics and while they have it they can’t find any issue or the problem doesn’t replicate itself? It’s frustrating as … well it’s frustrating.

That kind of is happening to me with all these doctor's appointments. I went in to the ENT to have Bogie checked out, got sent here (Oncologist), there (Hospital) and everywhere (back to Oncologist). Then got sent back to the ENT for a completely different issue (nasal polyps), only to be told that the polyps probably aren’t causing any issues with my sinuses and breathing. (Note – I said polyps using the plural form.) So now, I’m being sent somewhere else to have a sleep study done, because he (the ENT) thinks that maybe the problem is my throat – not that he looked in my throat or anything mind you. I fail to see how any problem my throat might or might not have can possibly cause sinus pressure in my head. Now I’m no doctor, but that doesn’t make sense to me.

Regardless, for the last month and a half I’ve been migraine free. Yea! … until yesterday. As I was leaving the ENT’s office a migraine hit. I kid you not. Fortunately I had someone with me that could drive. Point being, in the office – nothing. Out of the office – migraine. Then this morning when getting up I blew my nose and all I got was blood. I didn’t have a nosebleed. I just had blood in the mucus. I’m not trying to be disgusting folks, just trying to make the car analogy more relevant.

To be fair, I took Excedrin Migraine yesterday when I got home from the doctor’s office and it has aspirin in it. I have an allergy to aspirin. It’s not severe, but I have had it every since I can remember. This next statement is a common fact and I didn’t look it up on WebMD (see 2 posts ago) … Aspirin allergies can cause nosebleeds (which is why I don’t take it very often) and it can also irritate nasal polyps. So that’s three strikes for me.

Now back to the PLURAL nasal polyps. I don’t have one. I have two. Both in my cheeks or thereabouts. The ENT said that nasal polyps are normal, non-cancerous and more people than you realize have them and don’t know it. As a matter of fact, I bet half of you reading this have at least one nasal polyp. Of course, half of you reading this are from or live in the Ohio Valley, so really that was an easy guess. He said he didn’t think that they were causing me any distress, but he still wanted to look at some older scans to see if he can determine how long I’ve had them. He’s working that out with the hospital.

In the meantime, I have to have a sleep study. This is one of the main reasons why I have avoided going to an ENT in the first place. I don’t want to have a sleep study. Don’t misunderstand, I know many people who have had to go through sleep studies and as a result were given CPAP Machines to help them sleep better and/or to keep them breathing through the night. Most people love their CPAPs and I think it’s awesome that it helps those people. But I don’t feel like my problem has anything to do with that. Not saying I wouldn’t benefit from it, I just don’t think that’s the problem. Again, I’m not a doctor, but you know when your body is trying to tell you something. I’ve done my very best to interpret that “something” to various doctors and I feel like I’m going in circles or at the very least my car is in the shop and the mechanic can’t find anything wrong. Oh and don’t forget the big whopping charge you get every time the mechanic hooks your car up to the thingy that does the diagnostics. Yeah, that’s me and the all the doctor’s visits.

Maybe I just need to move to Arizona or New Mexico. Sure it’s like 500° in the summer, but it’s a dry heat. Yeah, I risk spontaneous combustion with heat like that, but if I could breathe while I’m combusting then that seems like a fair trade off. Of course, Mojo wouldn’t like the move so alas I’m stuck with the Ohio Valley and crappy sinuses and allergies. I love my home state of Kentucky, I just wish that the climate was more like Irvine, CA where they think 65° is a cold front and 80° is a heat wave. I just said that last part for my friend Karolyn’s benefit. Wooooooooooooo!

I’ll keep you posted as The Saga of the Ghastly Gasping unfolds. Or maybe it’s The Ballad of Bad Breathing. Whatever.

Peace Out,
Kat
1 Peter 5:7

1 comment:

  1. Don't go to Arizona or New Mexico. Everyone already did that and took their plants with them. Now they're nearly as bad as Kentucky. And I wouldn't discount the throat thing altogether. It's kind of like, the throat bone's connected to the nose bone...It's a convoluted system.

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