Nothing Good Happens at the Dr.

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After reading a post about Paul Cardall waiting for a heart transplant on the “Living for Eden” blog and thinking how hard that must be for his wife and young daughter I decided that perhaps I should get this leg swelling checked out.  Get a new doctor so I could get some other medication I should be taking refilled.  I came to this decision not because I had any expectation of a serious illness but because I was appreciative of my blessings of generally good health.

When I selected a new doctor and tried to make an appointment to come in for a new patient visit they said the earliest they had was 6 Oct 2009, that is four months!  Upon protesting that I did need to be seen a bit sooner and need some prescription refills they did agree to have a triage nurse call me and see if she could “justify” “squeezing” me in sooner (I am trying very hard to avoid an editorial on the medial establishment).  When she called she asked about the leg swelling and then asked if I had shortness of breath (still trying but…  I needed refills of asthma medication, so of course I am short of breath) at which point she determined I need to get to the emergency room immediately.  That was ridiculous and I protested to that affect pointing out the obvious, I did not have a heart problem I was not in the throws of a heart attack I just needed to see a Doctor sooner than four months.  She was unrelenting and insisted that I needed to be seen in the emergency room.

When I arrived at the emergency room she had called an told them I was coming and they were ready with a wheel chair etc.  I didn’t need a wheel chair and this all becoming quite ridiculous which I did express quite unmistakably.  For the next 5 hours I enjoyed my little ER suite, where my heart was x-rayed, sonogram’d, ekg’d and innumerable tubes of blood were taken.  By the time all of the blood was drawn I looked like either a heroine addict with bad aim or I had been in a fight with a vampire and lost.  The end result???  My heart was in good shape and had no problems.  Wow, that was a total an complete surprise (sarcasm), especially since I had insisted that from the beginning.

But wait there’s more… (here is where it starts to get strange)

All that blood they took to tests, it turns out I didn’t pass the test.  I had too high this and a too low that.  The doctor was very nice and reviewed every number with me which was nothing more than algebra soup.  The preliminary indication was… (drum roll). Cirrhosis of the Liver!  WHAT!!  I don’t even drink!  Something was wrong but it couldn’t be my liver.  But, it seems that alcohol is not the only cause of cirrhosis, just the most common.  Something else was causing scarring of my liver.  So now I needed an ultrasound of my liver which was scheduled for the next day.

As I left the hospital trying to take in the bomb that had just been dropped on me.  I didn’t really have a diagnosis, but it was clear from the blood test something wasn’t right.  As I drove the 45 minutes home I tried to figure out what all of this meant.  For some reason what came to mind was an episode of “How I Met Your Mother” titled “Nothing Good Happens After 2 AM.”  That episode had nothing to do with had just happened but I thought to myself “Nothing good happens at the doctor.”

Wow, what was happening.  I wasn’t sure what it meant.  There was a rush of emotions that covered the full spectrum.  Doing some research on webmd.com didn’t help.  Would I be dead in 1, 5, 10, 15 years.  My sense of normal had been swept away and I felt as if I had no bearings.

The next day I went in for the Ultra-sound and was met by the doctor and told that he had arranged an appointment for me with the visiting Hepatologist from the University of Wisconsin as soon as I was done with the Ultra-sound.  The Hepatologist poked me, prodded me and determined that we needed a long list of additional blood tests and a CT Scan.  So it was back to the vampire lab (I have run out of good veins and have more black spots on my arms than a leopard).  Later that day after he had reviewed my blood work he called and wanted me to get an additional blood test (I am wondering if I should just have a spigot installed) when I went in the next morning to do the CT Scan.

The next morning I showed up for the CT Scan and what I didn’t anticipate was that I had to spend two hours drinking barium solutions before the actual CT Scan.  So every 30 minutes someone would give me a glass of chalk water to drink.   This was finally toped off by an iodine IV during the test.  Talk about feeling warm and fuzzy, I was feeling just like an old piece of cheese, and even though it was an IV I could taste and smell the iodine as they pumped me full of it.  The test was uneventful, back and forth through the donut as the overhead voice told me when to breath.

That afternoon, my wife joined me in the Hepatologist’s office for the verdict.  The CT Scan was inconclusive, the blood work showed extremely elevated iron but was that because of the liver or was the liver because of the iron.  They had some “extra” blood from one of my tests so they sent it off for a genetic test to check for a possible hereditary disease.  So after all that we had no real answers.  No sense of the new normal, just the classic paradox of the chicken and the egg.

So we wait…