Returning to the Land of the Sick
Throughout June, I didn’t have any medical appointments. It was a lovely break from the land of the sick. Now that it’s July, I’m right back there.
Not that I have anything major going on, it’s all routine and an appointment with a new doctor. And the new doctor has nothing to do with my guts! Instead, he’s an orthopedist my PCP referred me to because I want to get ahead of the arthritis in my left knee.
Now, as to how the arthritis was discovered…
I took a header into the bathtub. I got out of bed, tripped on something and did a whole ricochet around the corner and into the bathroom like a rogue pinball machine ball. And then I couldn’t get out of the tub. And since I hit my head (blood thinners), I was going to need a CT scan, which meant I got to be hauled out of our bathtub by paramedics then taken to the hospital where I was scanned and x-rayed and apparently I have some age-related arthritis in my left knee.
But with all the problems I was having with my knees in April and May, I suspect there’s something odd going on with my gait so what I’m hoping for is a prescription for PT to fix my gait and improve my lower body strength overall. So I can get back on my treadmilling bullshit.
On the positive side, there’s a very good chance that I’ll be off blood thinners entirely after this coming week. I have a new hematologist and she thinks my old one was excessively cautious, as I had a clotting event caused by a one time event and now, almost 5 years on, my old blood vessels are scars now and no quantity of blood thinner is going to make them not.
It’s funny that she used the word “event” at our last appointment, because just the prior week my psychiatrist has used the word similarly when referring to my seizures–a “seizure event”–right before telling me he was going to start me on Wellbutrin and see how things went. Well, no seizures and a definite improvement both in my mood and my ability to focus on things–it doesn’t feel like so much work to focus, if that makes sense. I’m hoping I can use this as leverage to at least reduce the dose of Lexapro I’m on, which is the next drug I’d like to not take anymore. Some of my drugs are “optional” and others aren’t. I feel like the Lexapro is optional, since it didn’t seem to help the underlying greyness of all my moods, while the Wellbutrin has. This is why there’s lots of different brain pills! Not all of them work for every person! And sadly, experimentation is the name of the game.
…and I’m simply not going to talk about the current nightmare that has been my sleep schedule. Trying to reset it is hard and I hate it.