In Health News This Week...

I went to the neuro-opthalmologist last Thursday.  It was a long and exhausting appointment--got to the hospital by 7:30am and didn't leave until nearly 11am.  No one told me and I didn't foresee the (apparently) obvious that the doc would dilate my eyes--again, having just had it done the Friday before at my referring optometrist.  The dilating chemicals make me hyper-active and jittery and really mess with my mood.  I cried for most of the half hour dilation period and was emotionally fragile and not very logical for the rest of the appointment. I really was in no condition to drive home and couldn't have done it at all if my daughter hadn't been with me to read street signs and guide me back to the freeway.  Wanted very badly to nap when I got home but still had too much of the drug-induced agitation to sleep.  

The doctor "diagnosed" me with eleven things.  She was very excited and thought I should be gratified to have so many diagnoses, since she recognized my difficulty in obtaining care from previous doctors.  I wasn't impressed, though, when I saw that all of her "diagnoses" were just fancy clinical names for the symptoms she focused on in the appointment (not by any means my most annoying ones or even the ones that could be considered definitive of my case).  I have four or five different kinds of headache and "dry eye" and a painful point on the back of my head.  I'm still really annoyed that these things are considered "diagnoses" if a doctor writes them down on my chart but if I list them they are just "symptoms".

Anyway, she ordered some blood work (that will be negative, because it is the same basic stuff every doctor orders and I've been just fine on all those metrics) and, more importantly, an MRI that I scheduled for next week Thursday.  I'm not looking forward to it at all--being claustrophobic and, worse, so sensitive to drugs that I react for hours to dilation drops I can hardly wait to see what kind of reaction I get to the radioactive contrast dye they inject me with.  At least my husband is going to come with me so I don't have to think about driving home and he'll be in town if I have some later reaction that requires care.

It took me all weekend and a long coffee date with my confessor on Monday even to begin getting over the emotions riled up by the appointment.  It was a long week altogether with annual summer medical/dental visits for both my girls on top of the regular kids' activities and my own healing visits.  I've spent this week, so far, crashed in my bed, napping and reading trashy novels.  And weeping with anger at how exhausted I am.

I am really hoping that whatever is going on in my head will be glaringly obvious on the MRI so that a diagnosis will be clear and I can dispense with all this traipsing from doc to doc, hearing only, "well, you must be perfectly healthy because your tests all came back normal."