Medical Drama
Grey from my anatomy
Of late, I’ve self-diagnosed myself with a particular form of post-partum anxiety that manifests as in worry that I have an undiagnosed illness that will result in my untimely death and leave my daughter without her mother’s love and wisdom, leading her down a disastrous path that culminates in over plucking her eyebrows because no one tells her that once you do that YOU DON’T GET THEM BACK. I say self-diagnosed because when I switched health insurance I could no longer afford to see my therapist, but joke’s on them because now they just have to pay for more doctors’ appointments to quell my anxiety. Joke’s also on me because the copays are worse!
Anyway, I went to a giant medical complex last week to see an orthopedic surgeon and a GI specialist. These were for lingering issues that I am sure are fine but, you know, see paragraph above. Because things work smoothly, my first appointment was at 8:30 AM and the second was at 3 PM. There are two hours of free parking at the complex, which if you are skilled at math, works out to “not enough.” There is no nearby street parking.
My first appointment, with the orthopedic surgeon, was about chronic hip pain I’ve had since pregnancy. I was examined by a resident first. Now, I’m all for experiential learning but often when this happens it does make you feel like a real-life pop quiz and I don’t love that feeling. At the end he said, “I think I have an idea what it is but I’m going to bring in the doctor.” And then he left me alone with my thoughts.
The surgeon came in, did the same examination with…how do I put this…several additional decades of jaded cynicism. After rolling around and walking down the hall of the hospital in bare feet, ew he said it was one of two things but he’d need an MRI to know which one it was. One thing was muscular, solved by PT. The other thing was called “osteonecrosis” which can also be caused by pregnancy. I’m no doctor but I did take high school English and remember enough Greek and Latin roots to know osteo means “bones” and “necrosis” means death. I asked what would happen if I had that. He shrugged. I said, “Would physical therapy fix it?” He looked me in the eyes, for the first time since I met him, and told me, “No.” When I asked if I could get the MRI that day he laughed in my face. When I asked when I could get the MRI he said, “I don’t know.” He is the head of his department. Medicine is good.
I then went and had a dark night of the soul for three and a half hours where I ate a pupusa in a mostly abandoned restaurant and walked around a lake until my next appointment.
When I got the GI doctor, they told me my copay was $90, which is awesome, because I already pay a lot of money every month for my health insurance where the deductible is like, one million dollars. I think it’s the deductible? I still don’t understand the difference between deductibles and out of pocket maximums and I doubt I ever will even though my father will try to explain it to me in the comments to this article.
Anyway, this doctor was a woman and had blue hair, so things were already very different. She had written down my medical history by hand, in pencil, on a piece of a paper. After I assume some literal back of the envelope calculations she told me my problems were having a baby / food intolerance related, but I needed a blood test.
I went down to the blood test building, which allowed me the opportunity to spend more time at the medical complex. An iPad greeted me and then assigned me a number. After an hour of working on a needlepoint kit I keep in my purse to try to not look at my phone I started to suspect the iPad had made a mistake. It had. The staff profusely apologized on its behalf. When my phlebotomist (and yes, I know that word, because I’ve thought about becoming one from time to time over the past year) called me to her station she gestured to my needle and said, “I love needlepoint!” Which made sense.
When I went to leave they gave me a parking validation because I had been there so long, which meant walking over to another building and being sent a code to my phone, which was dead, so I drove to the top of the parking garage and turned on my car until my phone turned on and finally left that godforsaken place. My hip was killing me and stomach was acting up but at least I had the best ambiguous non-answers my middle-grade health insurance could buy.
I never gave birth to a baby, but I suffered for years from something someone in a frock called transitory migratory osteoporosis. It would depart from one hip, then take the express to the other: back and forth for months. Sometimes it was bearable, sometimes it was not, and I tried everything. My doctor misdiagnosed it as back pain and gave me a series of exercises that made it worse. A woo woo I knew sent me to a Heller therapist who specialized in improving posture, and she told me that my hips were to blame. I returned to my doctor with her diagnosis in hand, and he sent me to a radiologist who took X-rays and announced in his lilting Maharastran accent that he saw nothing wrong. So what should I do next? I asked him. How can I tell you, he replied, when I don’t see anything wrong? Eventually I saw an in-house sports doctor who told me not only that my hips were indeed the problem but spoke words I have always wanted to hear: “Mr Ward, you must be in terrible, terrible pain. I can’t imagine how you’ve stood it all this time.” He sent me off for a bone scan which determined that my bones had become porous and blood was not flowing to my hips the way it should. Next stop was an orthopedic surgeon who, his eyes never leaving his computer screen, told me I had fragile, porous bones, and what he was going to do was drill a quarter-inch hole in each hip bone to improve the blood flow. That’s when I spoke up and said if my hip bones were fragile and full of holes it didn’t make sense to drill holes in them. He looked over at me with a startled look, as though a dog had suddenly spoken, and said, “Absolutely. We don’t want to do that.” So we didn’t. In the end I took a lot of calcium pills and dealt with the pain with acupuncture, and eventually the condition ebbed away. Then, a few years later, I broke my femur, but further this deponent sayeth not.
Just wait till you’re old and add grandchild anxiety to your menu of ‘root causes of sleepless nights’. That, and all that Medicare coverage which has every orthopedist look as you like a cash machine. BTW, your eyebrows do grow back, just not in the same place. They relocate to your eyelids and forehead.