Who let the doctors out?
Okay, I’m the one who effectively sicced (?) them on myself. After my endoscopy in January, I decided to go up to the Cleveland Clinic (Land of 10,000 specialists) and get another opinion on whether I do/do not need surgery to fix my tummy troubles. So I recently went up to see a GI doc I can only describe as the Taiwanese Dr. Marcus Welby. The upshot of that conversation (and he did look at my tongue– wonder what it told him?) is that he wants more tests before deciding about surgery. These doctors! They just love measuring things.
So on to my third barium swallow next week– surely my least favorite drink ever. Third time’s a charm?? But at least it’s familiar and I know the drill. Then, and this is even better, I get to eat radioactive eggs! This amused Isaac no end. He came along to the appt with me because he was home with his ear infection. And so he spent the next hour riffing on the radioactive eggs. I won’t need a reading light because I’ll just open my mouth and a beam of light will come out; I won’t need to take the elevator because I’ll just climb up the outside of the building and come in the window; etc. First the radioactive blood and now this. I wonder if I’ll get another wallet card to alert the feds that I’m not carrying a suitcase nuke.
After all that, which is to say in early April, I’ll meet him again and we’ll see what he says regarding surgery or no. My mom has recently been regaling me with a horrible story of a dear elderly friend of hers who had his entire stomach go up into his esophagus and… well… it was awful to contemplate. The good news is that he did survive and is on the mend. The cautionary tale part of it is I don’t want this to be me. A quarter of my stomach in there is more than enough!
Okay, so onward. I then went to see the colleague of the good old Toni-Tenille-wig wearing ancient cardiological goddess I saw two years ago. You may remember that that experience left me in a state of total despair and hopelessness. For some reason I therefore avoided the whole department for two solid years. But finally I decided that I did need another cardiologist to lift the curse of the first one and find out whether or not exercise will actually kill me or cure me. So I made an appt with a jovial middle aged man, kind of a god in his field, I’ll call Dr. Fezziwig (not his real name). You won’t be surprised I suppose that I found myself in a state of emotional distress when I had to recount the goings on of the past two years, especially the bad nearly-passing-out-at-the-gym thing, which I do think has left me with a trace of PTSD.
But Dr. Fezziwig listened to all this and then told me all about the POTS study! I mean, THE POTS study that I’ve been trying to get into and even tried to do on my own in the fall. Suddenly it’s no problem to get into it– just call his secretary! Meanwhile, he began writing a long, long list of tests, including huge amounts of blood work when it’s already well established that I have not quite enough of the stuff in the first place.
He says he really thinks that what we’ll find is that nothing is actually wrong with my heart, but that i have mild dysautonomia (sort of a blanket term that includes POTS). He also said that they have no idea what POTS actually is, or how it works. He said it’s like the blind men and the elephant… I said, “You mean one says it’s like a rope and another says it’s like a tree trunk?” He said, “Yes! You’re the only person who knows what I’m talking about with that!” Wonderful– but the reality is a bad thing. … No one knows what this is… so that’s not all too reassuring. Some say it’s too small of a heart (The Grinch Syndrome guy). Others says it’s peripheral nerve damage. Others say it’s neurological. ANd while Dr. Fezziwig agrees that Cymbalta helps in some cases, like mine, no one actually knows why.
Can you guess where this is leading? More tests! I actually want these though, because the heart fear worries me enough that I’d be very happy to make sure that it’s okay. So… I’m wearing a wire! This makes me feel so awesome, like I’m informing for the FBI, or might just choose to detonate something remotely if the mood strikes me. It’s a 30-day heart monitor called, charmingly enough, “The King of Hearts.” It has these little sticky things that I stick on my right upper chest and left lower rib cage and then snap the wires on to it and wear this little walkie-talkie thing clipped to my pocket. When I’m having “a cardiac event” I press record and it tracks it for a minute and a half. Then when I get three I call it in and the little box tells their computer what’s been happening through the phone.
So far it’s shown that my heart rate goes up way too high at the slightest thing, which makes me dizzy. This is a way of life to me, and not new, but it’s nice to have it tracked. And when my heart pointlessly starts to race at bedtime, when I’m 80% asleep, it’s nice to track that too.
In addition to the monitor, he’s ordered a stress test, which I really should have had ages ago, and this weird thing called a QSART. I’ll just attach the link and you can try to figure it out if you want. It’s very technical but I guess it tests your sweat response as a way of finding nerve damage. And he’s sending me to real exercise physiologist to again put me on a treadmill and see if I faint or turn green or grow antlers or what.
I called today to try to schedule a follow-up appt with Dr. Fezziwig after all that, and shockingly– or not all shockingly– the lady was a complete bitch about it. I can see that once again I will be made to wait eternally for a horrible letter that will tell me nothing useful. I can only hope that when I get back into to see Dr. Fezziwig in person, whenever his henchwomen let me near him again, he will explain it all. He seems to actually be interested in helping me and I certainly hope he can.
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