Tuesday, April 14, 2009

I guess it has been a while..

The day after I last posted, I was in a serious car accident.
Thankfully, I was wearing my seat belt, as was the driver. We were both injured, but survived, and there were no other vehicles involved.

Separate from the on-going medical stuff that is already going on, on April 6th (day of the accident) I was taken to the ER via ambulance on a backboard in a cervical collar. My glasses were ruined.
They took a head CT, chest x-ray, abdominal CT, and left ankle x-ray. Nothing for pain. They waited to take the cervical collar off even after the tests cleared me because they said that the type of pain I was having indicated that there may be some sort of break in my neck and they wanted the attending to check it out. She cleared me.
On the 8th, I had visible bruising on my abdomen and increased pain. I had headaches isolated to the left side of my head and going down to my nose. I tried to get back to the ER via public transit, but got worse, so I wound up getting of the bus and getting an ambulance. They took blood from my groin because they couldn't get any from my arm. That was NOT fun. They did an ultrasound of my belly and that's about it. They did give me insulin even after I told them that I did not need insulin and that it would cause problems if they gave me any. They gave it anyway, which resulted in me getting soaked with sweat and shaking and being quite out of it with a blood sugar of 44, at which point they HAD to get a line into me to give me glucose by IV. Then they discharged me.
I was still having the headaches on Saturday, so I went to a different ER specializing in this sort of thing to get checked out.
I saw my PCP on Monday (yesterday) and he prescribed a muscle relaxer to try to alleviate some of the pain.

Okay, back to the "regular" stuff. (Ha!)
I did go back to the dentist but he did not lance the gland because of the trauma to my head. I am on Amoxicillin and have to go back in a week to see what the progress is and hopefully get it taken care of at that point.
During my appointment with my PCP, he agreed that I should be tested for MRSA, but did not do the test because he had to have the visit "only accident related" Ummm.... okay.
He also did not like the fact that the renal specialist wants me to try coming off of the Diovan and teh Actos to see if helps lessen the edema. Apparently both drugs cause edema. The timing does not match with when I swelled up, but she wants to be sure that they are not making matters worse. She called this morning about coming off of them and I am going to go with the opinion of the specialist right about now. I am not hypertensive, and I understand that some blood pressure meds are used to help prevent diabetic kidney problems, but this is a kidney specialist telling me to come off of it, so I am going to try to have a bit of health in that fact.

I went to have an abdominal MRI yesterday, to follow-up on the one I had in July. That was an event and a half. It took about 8 sticks from 3 people to get blood from me, and then when they got the blood, they didn't start the IV line. So it took about 6 more pokes from 2 more people to get the line into a very odd spot on my left arm. I was then told I'd be going in in 7 minutes. THEN I was told that the blood test was not back because the blood machine was broken and it would be at least another hour. I started crying and said that I can't go through this again, because it had already been too long and painful of a day. Luckily they decided that the results they had from a few months ago were good enough and they sent me in. It was difficult in my swollen and banged-up state, but I got through it. Hopefully I will get the results sent to me fairly quickly.

Sunday, April 5, 2009

And so it goes...

I went to the renal specialist at the major hospital last Monday.
It was a VERY long appointment. She did not do much, physically, but she did a lot of writing and listening, which is more than I can say for many doctors.
She noticed what she called a "yellow spot" under my tongue and said that I should have it checked out by my dentist.
I am supposed to do a 24 hour urine, but am supposed to wait to do it til she calls.
I go back to see her the end of the first week in May.
The next day, I went to my PCP and he told me that I needed to "get control" when I started crying a tiny bit about the whole confusing mess, and when I said "That's the problem, I don't HAVE control" he told me that I am "too emotional". What a load of crap.
He basically made it clear that he doesn't know what is going on, and he doesn't care to find out. I brought up the MRI of my liver again, that needs to be re-done, and he said he'd write the order, but no one has called.
I did go to the dentist and he said it is some sort of gland that is occluded and I need to put hot packs on it and hope that it will take care of it, and I need to go back in a week to get it checked. If it isn't gone, then he will lance it.