Lumps

Well it seems to have been medical month (again).

Cat has been to get mammograms and see an oncologist, at the recommendation of her OB-GYN. Mercifully, it seems she just has a benign cyst, and the stabbing pain she is getting in her other breast are customary for the onset of menopause. Did I mention how much it seems to suck just being a woman?

And I've just been to the doctors & gotten a prescription for antibiotics, after getting what seems to be a spider bite on the back of my right hand - it raised a lump about 2 inches square, which failed to go down in a couple of days as I was expecting, hence the doctor. Nasty bugs hereabouts, it seems. The only odd bit really was that neither I nor the doctor could see any puncture wounds, yet it definitely seems to be infectious not inflammatory.

more medical

Well it's been a bit of a grim time of recent. This last week or so I've been going insane from itching alllllll over my skin, shifting and maddening and unignorable.

Not sure of the cause, it seems to have arrived a bit after the cold extremely arid weather shift since the new year (under 10% humidity and subzero temperatures even at 3 pm). This has caused extreme static issues for everyone - which the cats, being longhair, particularly hated, and as a result, Cat started using an anti-static fabric softener.

So I'm not sure whether the itching is a reaction to the fabric softener, or simply from my skin drying out too much. However, she's stopped using it & rewashed everything that had it, we've bought a humidifier to run at home, and I'm rubbing moisturiser into all my skin twice a day, and one or more of those seems to have resolved the issue, as it's more or less gone away now, thanks be - it was quite maddening, and also fairly dangerous - all too easy to scratch a hole, and with my lamentable healing rate, infection & a festering ulcer is all too likely then.

I've also just been back to the Vein Centre who operated on my leg at the end of last year, as my foot is still every bit as swollen as it was (altho my calf and knee have had their swelling reduce enormously). He's sending me off to a Lymphedema clinic (man they have specialist clinics for everything!*) to get additional treatment but he did observe that he wouldn't expect what he'd done to effect much change on the foot in less than 3 months, so maybe I'm being a bit previous.

I've thought about that since the visit an hour ago and I'm really not sure that I believe him about that 3 month thing - given the circulatory systems working that seems a little specious (if very convenient for putting people off/blurring their memories) ... but not a lot I can do about that anyway.

Oh well, another round of medical joy


*Of course, in a strictly-for-profit medical system, this makes sense, for the doctors, if not for anyone else involved or for society at large .... but Americans dont really do society.

Medical Day, again

Just a quick note - had my laser surgery done on the veins in my left leg yesterday, and all went well, they tell me. It was pretty uncomfortable and fitfully painful in a small way: lots of injections, at least 20-odd for local anaesthesia and 20-30 more for the vein-collapsing goo where the veins were too small to fit the catheter: and my leg hurts like a bastard today, as to be expected.

Now I have to wear a support-hose for a week and a half while the veins seal up and close properly, but the upshot should be an absence of blood pooling in the foot and calf, which would be very nice (esp the repeated stabbing pains that come along with that)

Oh and why does catheter sound like catholic? Well it's just a little prick, an awful lot of pushing, and it can make a huge difference to your life.

Well I guess that's good news

Hmm, been a bit scary here for the last few days.

I started having a pounding pulse & rapid heartbeats, together with a pain in the left of my chest, not all the time, but coming occasionally and going. Rather hard and terrifying to think about, or try to handle, really.

But, I made an appointment, waited, and tried to increase my daily exercise in the meantime. It turns out to be a rather simple problem, a depletion of potassium in my blood due to prescription diuretics (to help with a swollen ankle/foot), so a switch of pill, and a potassium pill (designed for horses from the size of it) seem to be the straightforward solution.

Whew :)

One thing I'm relatively pleased with, is being able to look at the problem and deal with it at all - it used to be my wont to shy away/run away even when that was a terminally (bad joke) bad idea: for almost a decade I had a lump under my left nipple, which I tried really hard not to think about at all, until I gathered the courage to tell Cat (not long after we started living together) and she helped me get to a doctor to have it examined ... turned out to be a benign cyst which he removed with a small clinic surgery procedure. A decade of spasmodic bouts of worry and terror, for naught, pretty stupid really.

It would have been good to get over this idiotic attitude earlier in life, but, eh, so be it, better late than never.

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Wandering off onto something less scary and more bizarre (OK, even more bizarre):
I keep getting pinged (er, stopped, queried, laughed at, asked to explain, whichever) by my use of strange words of excessive length and obscurity. Now, I know I do love strange obscure and antique words, but the ones I'm being hauled up on, I would have thought absolutely commonplace and normal. Just in the last month, these ones spring to mind:

Felicitations (on a birthday)
Loquacious
Eloquent
Elegant
Miniscule
Convex

oh, and numerous times, Fortnight - this is regarded as a seriously bizarre word in the USA for some reason.

On the other hand, I have to say I loathe the 'ghetto/rap slang' I keep having to deal with, online - pretty much invariably from teenage white boys wanting to be cool - and just to keep up my Grumpy Old Geezer cred, I usually refuse to respond to or acknowledge it, even when I understand (which ain't always).

Health

Well, this is interesting.

On Thursday night, I spent the night in the Sleep Clinic at the nearest hospital, having my sleep studied for apnea, which frankly you could have diagnosed in about 30 seconds with a paper cup pressed to the bedroom door (or a geophone* hehheh). It was about as unpleasant as it could be, short of, yanno, actual surgery or illness, but on the upside, the diagnosis was confirmed, and they (eventually after much shuffling of papers and waiting around) issued me with a CPAP machine.

This comes with a mask, or in my place a noseplug, to feed air to you at night at overpressure (quite a LOT of overpressure it turns out), and assists in breathing by forcing the breathing passage open when it closes.

Stupid really, I've known I have apnea for aeons now, at least 15 years - and it was probably much longer without my realising, as it's quite insidious. I'd thought repeatedly about getting this treatment, but the idea of covering up my face and nose at night just made my skin creep, so I kept putting it off. What changed my mind was simply in some stupid TV program, seeing someone getting fitted with a mask while he slept and ... son of a gun, it was a tiny thing, didnt cover his mouth at all, or most of his nose! Realising (duh!) that there must be many variations for different levels of claustrophobia, completely changed my mind.

Parenthetically, I wouldn't have said I have claustrophobia ordinarily, but something about the whole cover-the-nose-and-mouth thing just makes me feel smothered, even just contemplating it.

So, after three nights, I must admit it seems to be going pretty fantastically well. I've got sleeping pills to take at night, so I can get used to wearing the mask - just as well, it would I'm sure keep me awake otherwise. Both Saturday and Sunday, I just felt .. better. Not boing! bouncing off the walls full of energy, just better, a little more clearheaded: and I didnt need a nap either day, which ordinarily would be an absolute necessity on the weekend. Definitely a big improvement.

Now I'm trying to get my head around the idea of having laproscopic surgery for a stomach stapling, or whatever it's called now. I've toyed with the idea for a long time, but always been put off because when Mum had it done, it seemed to have an awful lot of unintended & unpleasant consequences, and not to deliver that much positive for all that price ... but as my doctor, and Cat, have pointed out, they've made a huge number of improvements and advances since then, and it's a lot safer, less invasive, and more positive in outcomes.

There's a woman at work who had it a while back, and a guy who has just had it, and both are completely positive about it.

Mostly, I just need to get it embedded and normalised in my head - especially the idea that I'll be eating tiny meals, and NOT being or feeling deprived about it. That may take a little while to drill through, but without that I can see I'd just do something foolish. Plenty to contemplate: hard to imagine a new slimline Phil full of energy, really :)

Medical Day, again

Well, it seems like medical day today: I'm off to the Sleep Clinic this afternoon to see whether they'll treat me (i.e. give me one of those overpressure masks). Not at all sure that I will be able to sleep in it, but it's got to be worth trying - and of course I should have done this years ago, really.

Otherwise my bruises and scratches are gradually healing up - some of them are sunset spectaculars now, and a couple only showed on Sunday, and are still coming up - on my wrist and the side of my stomach, and on one foot. So I guess I'll be wearing them for a few days yet, to show off to the real estate agents :)

Martin, most steadfast of friends, advised me to seek compensation from the property owner (in this case, a bank, as it's a foreclosed property), and I suspect he's right that I should do so, but ... ahh .. this is still a property I'm interested in making a bid on, and I don't want to queer the pitch for that: if they've had to pay me, even a trivial sum, it may make them harder-nosed about negotiating on the final price and conditions.

In fact, I should discuss this with the agent and get them to raise it with the Bank, if we offer, to try and use it as a lever - gratitude isn't quite the word, it's more, well ... heh, blackmail (how appropriate, looking at my bruises). Well, that's a bit harsh, but it might be a useful additional lever - and probably much easier for the property manager to adjust the price, than to have to explain a claim for compensation.

We are still having headaches about financing tho - the mortgage seems quite straightforward, but if we buy somewhere needing repairs, we'll need additional (unsecured) credit, and that seems to be unavailable to me at the moment: at least, I've contacted a couple of banks and the credit union, and none of them are interested. I don't think that this is about me (I've checked my credit rating which is fine), so I guess they are just being tight and super-cautious after last years spectacular financial disasters, and the subprime mortgage fiasco.

Oh well, we'll keep looking for ways around that - perhaps arrange for a higher purchase price, with a 'redecoration allowance' stipulated as part of the price, as we've seen on a couple of TV shows. Failing that, we'll just have to buy a finished house - that wouldn't exactly break my heart, but Cat would be massively disappointed, she really wants projects to improve a house and set her own design seal on it - she probably should have been an architect or a master builder, when I think on it. And, of course, financially you can make a lot more in appreciation, on a house you get fixed up yourself.

Still, there are some lovely finished houses we've seen, still dirt-cheap, even by Little Rock standards - the foreclosures are hitting, and some neighbourhoods are being quite crippled by them it looks like: every block has 3 or 4 for-sale signs out in some areas. We shall see.

Medical Bulletin Day

Well, first off, a trifle of good news: my calf problem is in fact just cellulitis, & I've gotten antibiotics to finish clearing it up. I have to say (immediately wandering off topic) that we were amazingly lucky in picking our doctor when we got here - she & her husband are in joint practice, are SF-fans (nuts) complete with photos shaking hands with Shatner (!) and a Deforest Kelly Award on the wall for providing medical services for one of the WorldCons, and she is so incredibly friendly, open and relaxed: we're never hurried through or given the brush-off, she never patronises us, she's quite open about her own medical issues (and issues with doctors' attitudes, to my great amusement), and we always feel well-informed, and well tended.

Not sure how we got so lucky, but she's the first doctor I've met since leaving NZ that understands (and complies with!) the concept of informed consent - not that all NZ doctors are up to scratch on that of course :) Given all the horror stories I'd heard over the years about American medicine and the mercenary nature of it, I feel like we've struck a tiny vein of gold in a bedrock of pure lead.

Yesterday, for instance, she spent an hour dealing with both of us (from our UK experiences, we'd learned to always to to appointments together, for a variety of reasons). By any other standards, that's at least twice what'd I would expect: and this is on top of the nurse conducting the initial formalities (weight check, temp check, taking initial notes as to the cause of the visit - all very efficient & a good idea of how to maximise the doctors' utility, I think).

And the hour was well-spent, don't get me wrong. In her relaxed & charming manner, she reviewed all our medications (quite a list, between the two of us!), checked symptoms, and carefully left openings to draw us out & find anything we might have been shying away from mentioning. All in all, really impressive as a technique, I think.

I was going to launch into another rave today, but it'll have to wait for another time: all of a sudden, I'm a bit busier at work - not actual functional things to do, just checklists and reports and paper-chasing for the new manager. Hmm, what do you call paper-chasing in the brave new world of email and the internet? Electron-chasing? pixel-chasing? tail-chasing?