Sometimes It Feels Like a Three Ring Circus

I will admit, I’ve been shying away from posting some of the medical stuff I’ve been going through online; it’s kind of a silly reason so I’m not going to explain it. But today was full of such medical fuckery that it would be a disservice to humankind not to share at least parts of it.

In my last medical update, I was scurried off for emergency testing because they saw some sort of cystic lesions around my surgical site. This test was supposed to be an abdominal CT. I went to Johns Hopkins the next day and got that taken care of.

Then I waited. And waited. There were symptoms I was told to look out for, and when they occurred I called my GP. And waited. Finally, I called the office and asked for the practice manager; she promptly informed me that they had not yet received the results of my “STAT” CT, but that she was going to call JH and get them right away. She called back about an hour later and told me they had seen a small nodule, but nothing to be alarmed about, and I should re-test in 3-6 months.

You’d think this would be good news, but I informed her that my symptoms were increasing, and getting pretty uncomfortable, and what was I supposed to do now? She informed me that she is not a doctor, so the best bet would be to come back in and see my GP again. We made an appointment for the following Monday (today).

Please remember in this story, that I’m not living in my former home in Germantown. I’m about an hour and a half away, and most of the journey is on commuter highways. So we had to leave at the crack of dawn (literally) to make our morning appointment. I had a very bad emotional night, so I had only gotten about two hours of sleep. We pulled into the parking lot with only moments to spare and was seen pretty much right away.

I then find out that my appointment is not with the GP I’ve been seeing for years (who at least pretends to have a grip on my whole medical situation) but a new doctor to the practice. I ask if it would be possible to see my GP instead, since I saw him in the office while I was waiting. I was told that no, he was not available and my choices were to see New Doctor now, or make another appointment to see GP. Since we had traveled a while and gotten up early, I went with New Doctor, which is always the bad choice.

She comes in, and she’s this diminutive Indian-looking woman (I don’t know her actual heritage). I have to admit to a little bias here: I try to stay away from doctors with heavy accents, as I have a hard time understanding doctors without them, and it only makes communication more difficult. As she introduces herself, I realize that she has a accent, but I do my best and ask a lot of questions.

I give her the short story of what’s been going on with the emergency surgery in April, and more recently, and she pulls up my file on the computer. However, she can’t seem to locate my CT. Finally, she gets the practice manager to come in, who remembers my story, and finds it immediately. The doctor comments, “But this is a chest CT, not an abdominal one.” My heart sinks, somewhat appropriately from my chest into my abdomen.

Turns out, the GP’s office wrote a script for the wrong CT. (Even though I knew the answer, I specifically asked her, “So was the screw-up that the wrong script was written, or that the techs did the wrong test?” and after hemming and hawing, admits that the screw-up was on them.)

I will admit, I almost lost my shit. I mean, I’ve been having a pretty difficult emotional time, what with the separation and my friend dying and my car not turning over last night, so I came in a little loaded to bear. But this sure felt like a camel-breaking straw. I did my best to swallow my seething frustration and decided to ask about the “nodule” they found.

She says it’s pretty small (6mm), which is probably nothing to worry about, but that I’ll need another chest CT in 3 months. I inform her that I’m seropositive for TB, and that changes her tune. She gives me a referral for a pulmonologist (in that area, rather than near where I’m currently living, which is basically useless to me) and urges me to follow up with him to make sure it’s not TB. Hurray!

Then we get back to the matter at hand. She does a quick exam of my belly, and immediately feels the difference between the rigid parts and the softer parts. She also sees that pushing on certain areas cause me pain. She looks at my surgical scar, and then she tells me to get dressed again.

She informs me that it’s probably a “seratoma” (Dr. Google couldn’t find much by that, but I think she meant seroma, but it we need the CT to be certain. (The funny part is that Dr. Google says that seromas are almost always due to surgical error, but I don’t even have the mental spoons to go there.) It could also be an abscess, which is pretty dangerous, especially in someone like me who gets infections easily. The normal course of action is to go see the surgeon who performed the procedure, and I make it very clear to her that I am basically unwilling to do that unless it’s my last and only option.

She explains that I could ask for a second opinion, and if that second doctor found something noteworthy, they would be the one to correct it, not the original surgeon. I ask her if it’s at all possible to skip the part where I go to Dr. WLS at all, and she comes up with an idea. She calls Dr. WLS office and leaves a voicemail asking if he’d be willing to make a second opinion referral right away. Unfortunately, because nobody answered, I have to wait a few days to find out the end of that tale.

I end the appointment by asking her my stock questions in these sorts of situations: is there anything I can do for the symptoms? Nope. You’re already on heavy painkillers. (Uh huh. Like they will do anything.) All right, I say, so what symptoms do I look for that say “Go to the ER?” She lists a few, but they’re all symptoms I experience pretty much daily. The only one that stood out was “7 out of 10 pain”, to which I replied, “Well, then, I should have gone to the ER last Wednesday, because I was in a fair amount of pain for hours then.” She lists the rest, and again, nothing that would alert me any more than usual.

So here I sit. Now I have to go back into emergency mode, because if these things are seromas, they could be mildly dangerous; if they are abscesses or, y’know, just about anything else, it can be pretty fucking serious. And unless something earthshattering happens, I’m likely to overlook symptoms that might mean GO NOW, because I can’t discern them from everyday stuff. My best bet is to get the tests done right away, and try to keep my head about me, which is a little hard seeing as all the stress I’m under. I also already had two other appointments this week that I can’t reschedule, both in DC, which is an even further commute than my GP. (Did you see the part about my car not working?)

Really and honestly, I’m at wits end. I just don’t have the brain or body spoons to deal with this in any kind of rational manner. All I can do to keep functioning is only deal with what is right in front of me in the exact moment it exists in my field of view, and try very hard not to look at my life in any sort of detail. Life would be, oh, six hundred times less stressful if I could somehow be back in Germantown, so all these doctor visits would be half an hour rather than two, but that doesn’t seem to be a negotiable point right now.