Azure Jane Lunatic (Azz) 🌺 (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
azurelunatic) wrote2022-04-05 12:28 am
azurelunatic) wrote2022-04-05 12:28 am
X-Ray OK!
This past Wednesday's activities, before I fully forget.
Note: this entry mentions, extensively if not in any great detail, the symptom that I posted about locked last Monday. (Tags are relevant to the x-ray, as of the time of posting.)
I had two appointments that day; I'd declined the 3pm appointment with my GP in favor of the 3:20 because I had a 2pm-3 appointment with my therapist. I decided that the best way to approach was to drive to the appointment first, then take the therapist call in the parking lot, and after that go check in for the GP visit.
On the way there I got to make the day of several small children at the back of a bus, who were staring out the back and waving at the car just behind them (me). I waved back. They made excited motions, then sat back down and faced front (possibly after having been told to).
I had a lot of feelings about my access to the medical technology that would have let me breathe better as a kid. A LOT. A fuckin' inhaler might have changed the trajectory of my life.oursin recently mentioned a lack of central heating as accompanied by a lot of respiratory diseases, and why yes.
One of the things that accompanies being a person who Thinks About Things is being told by people who aren't necessarily that kind of people that you've been overthinking things. Specifically, in this case, my therapist, and self-defense. Which is absolutely bogus. Yes, I have a general self-defense plan. Like people encourage women-shaped people to have. I recently had to revamp it! Because I learned things about prone restraint due to the super high profile death of that guy! And now that I know these things, I would not be a responsible human being if I continued to have a self-defense plan that could kill a person. (The general shape of the previous plan: sit on 'em. Current shape: sit on 'em but *carefully*.)
Things I have also spent time thinking about recently, an abbreviated list:
* why I was coughing out blood last Monday
* food, and why the human requirement for regular amounts and specific types of it is an affront to the hard-working enby
* medical bias against people who look like me
* whether or not I should put in a query about 7 pounds of reusable desiccant
* which button on the downstairs toilet actually is the more-water flush
* whether I should sew the pillowcase foralexseanchai's square bolster satin side out or satin side in
* Ukraine.
* Fruit flies.
* An orange cat named Jorts. (He is not a clever man.)
* Labor actions against Amazon and Starbucks
* Managing IRC log files
* why making the exhaust filtration on a battery powered air filtration mask gadget a consumable part, especially if separate from the intake filtration, would be ethically questionable if not ethically bankrupt
Compared to almost any one of those example items, I have not thought about self-defense even a tenth as much except when my therapist said something that reminded me of it. (Also I hate that toilet.) Every now and then something brings up the topic, I mentally validate that my current back-of-the-brain plan still applies, and drop it because I've already thought it through enough to satisfy my sense of how things should be. In any given week, I don't think about it at all.
Later, I emailed a thread from Nome the Barbarian, on neurodivergence, survival, and "overthinking".
Since I was currently coughing, and the GP's office didn't have the exam room ready yet, I was asked to wait out in my car. I waited for 15 minutes past the intended exam start time, and poked my head in to see if it was ready yet just about when they were going to call me.
I approved of the medical assistant's llamas, but did not care for the puzzle pieces.
My GP was going to be out of town soon, but she agreed that coughing out blood was not a good symptom, looked gravely at my series of photos of handkerchiefs, and learned about Valley Fever. Which the CDC has a page for, because it's not widely known. (I lived, as we recall, in the Phoenix metro area, which has dust.) https://www.cdc.gov/fungal/diseases/coccidioidomycosis/index.html So I figured that she should know about the possibility.
She examined my prophylactic bottle of penicillin (that I was given in case a particular dental operation went badly, and that I didn't need to start), allowed as how it was entirely reasonable that I would bring it up, but she wanted to hit whatever was going on with a Z-pak. And she was ordering labs: I should go get them done today. Including the chest x-ray.
I stopped in the restroom on my way out, and was derailed by the emergency pull cord being wrapped around the railing. (Again. Still.) I took photos. I also set my post-exam information sheets down. I went off to the adjacent lab, cringed when I got gendered, gave two tubes of blood for testing, and headed off to my car to make the call for the x-ray appointment.
And ran back inside to get the post-exam papers, which I'd left in the restroom.
By this time it was after 4pm, and I had a bit of a small tizzy with the x-ray scheduler, but it turned out I didn't need to go home to get any paperwork, I could just show up in any lab. And I got the directions to one particular one with plentiful parking.
I arrived about five minutes before closing, and of course all the lab techs had gone home. I was redirected to the ER. (My GP wanted this done TODAY, and I am of course coughing out blood.)
I take the time to IM the group chat that contains partners, housemate, and kid. I request Belovedest to go pick up my prescription (the pharmacy closes at 7) because I'm not sure how long this-all is going to take. My overwhelming emotion at this point is that a) I want someone with me to navigate all this, and I won't be getting one at any point in the immediate future, b) I feel a lot like I did in 2016, staring down the long tube of Miscellaneous Uterus Disease and Operation, and c) at least I have someone who can pick up the pills and probably make dinner happen, which I would have had to arrange for myself back in 2016. (Though I did get excellent help from family around the actual surgical date, which was good.)
The entrance I pick is not a good one, despite the lady in Building C saying that I should take entrance # whatever and walk within the building from there. I am redirected around front, and detour twice to doors that are locked. After regretting that I ever had legs, I arrive in the ER. I present my paperwork and declare that the regular imaging place is closed, and since I am coughing out blood, my GP would like this done today. This is seen as entirely reasonable. What is not happening is the ability to send me back to the ER's imaging department. The receptionist takes off her mask to call Imaging. Oh, because the x-ray was already marked as complete? Because I checked in to building C but then it turned out the techs were gone? (No, I did not even give my name there, but it is less energy to let her steamroller her assumptions all over, and I suspect it was marked completed in the lab adjacent to my GP. Which doesn't even have an x-ray machine anymore.) OK, issue a new order. (My medical-labs-adjacent partner <> cringed at that bit.)
The imaging tech showed up, and calmly interviewed me as we walked towards that department. I was shown to a cubicle and removed bra, necklace, pin, and anything else that could have been metal and above the waist or below the chin. (I did not get the ball-bearing stickers for my nipples this time.)
Two poses and we were done. I re-dressed, then wrote a message of praise on the whiteboard that seemed to be there for their management to pass along encouragement. I was back out to the parking lot through more big empty hallways, and back in my car. It had taken a surprisingly short amount of time.
I changed plans: I was going to go pick up my prescription, and Belovedest could be in charge of finding food. Call me with any questions. Belovedest rung me as I was about to arrive at the pharmacy, and we discussed pizza options.
Thursday morning, the cough was still present but the blood was not. The cough has been diminishing since then. I called Billing and confirmed that even though I'm on the payment plan that I'm on, that I was only being billed the once. Test results started to come in. Chest x-ray: clear. Bloodwork: the person covering for my GP says it's clear, but I see one abnormal result in the list. I look up that value, and I see that it being elevated can be a sign of allergies, fungal infection, cancer, Cushing's disease ...
... so, probably allergies. Which I have. A lot of. My GP comes back on the 6th, I think. We can discuss after that.
Friday was April Fool's Day, which I normally celebrate, but I just had no energy for that. Belovedest's day off, so I re-did the shopping list, updated my PineTime firmware, and we did A Shopping. My favorite April Fool of the few I did see was SkratchLabs: would you like to book time with their labs to meet your sports goals? These three labrador retrievers are standing by! Alas, no real doggos, but some adorable stickers that the first N orders would get. Aww.
Saturday I was feeling perky enough to even go afield and check out the free leftovers of a yard sale. I found some stuff and had a good chat with Nora. The update from the condo zone: it's a bad fit for multiple people visiting at night, alas, not without carpool arrangements.
Sunday involved a lot of interior design discussion with Ev. Theoretical for now, but we have established that a nice sturdy Twin XL frame with good clearance underneath, and a Twin XL trundle, is what we'd want, and then we could make it up as a daybed.
Today is Monday. I did my "homework" before seeing my psych, which is filling in my sleep chart. (He really likes my sleep chart; he says it's laid out well and easy to understand.) We're leaving my sleep meds as-is, since I'm sleeping better and have not had another "red" night since hitting the current dose, and we are fucking with my Strattera again.
Or, well, we WOULD be, but the pharmacy texted while we were getting my Toaster refueled. The thing's on backorder. So I'll stick at the current dose for a little while, maybe if I have some leftovers I can poke at the thing, and I'll see him in another month.
I realized that perhaps I had not told Mama and Tay about the coughing out blood thing, after mentioning the fact to Belovedest's Fishie and getting yelled at in Internet Stepchild. The upshot of that yelling-at was an invitation to the group chat in which I announced the thing, because I was too wiped out to broadcast any more widely. So far Mama and Tay have not responded to that, but it's also pretty late and I'm the night owl here.
Note: this entry mentions, extensively if not in any great detail, the symptom that I posted about locked last Monday. (Tags are relevant to the x-ray, as of the time of posting.)
I had two appointments that day; I'd declined the 3pm appointment with my GP in favor of the 3:20 because I had a 2pm-3 appointment with my therapist. I decided that the best way to approach was to drive to the appointment first, then take the therapist call in the parking lot, and after that go check in for the GP visit.
On the way there I got to make the day of several small children at the back of a bus, who were staring out the back and waving at the car just behind them (me). I waved back. They made excited motions, then sat back down and faced front (possibly after having been told to).
I had a lot of feelings about my access to the medical technology that would have let me breathe better as a kid. A LOT. A fuckin' inhaler might have changed the trajectory of my life.
oursin recently mentioned a lack of central heating as accompanied by a lot of respiratory diseases, and why yes. One of the things that accompanies being a person who Thinks About Things is being told by people who aren't necessarily that kind of people that you've been overthinking things. Specifically, in this case, my therapist, and self-defense. Which is absolutely bogus. Yes, I have a general self-defense plan. Like people encourage women-shaped people to have. I recently had to revamp it! Because I learned things about prone restraint due to the super high profile death of that guy! And now that I know these things, I would not be a responsible human being if I continued to have a self-defense plan that could kill a person. (The general shape of the previous plan: sit on 'em. Current shape: sit on 'em but *carefully*.)
Things I have also spent time thinking about recently, an abbreviated list:
* why I was coughing out blood last Monday
* food, and why the human requirement for regular amounts and specific types of it is an affront to the hard-working enby
* medical bias against people who look like me
* whether or not I should put in a query about 7 pounds of reusable desiccant
* which button on the downstairs toilet actually is the more-water flush
* whether I should sew the pillowcase for
alexseanchai's square bolster satin side out or satin side in* Ukraine.
* Fruit flies.
* An orange cat named Jorts. (He is not a clever man.)
* Labor actions against Amazon and Starbucks
* Managing IRC log files
* why making the exhaust filtration on a battery powered air filtration mask gadget a consumable part, especially if separate from the intake filtration, would be ethically questionable if not ethically bankrupt
Compared to almost any one of those example items, I have not thought about self-defense even a tenth as much except when my therapist said something that reminded me of it. (Also I hate that toilet.) Every now and then something brings up the topic, I mentally validate that my current back-of-the-brain plan still applies, and drop it because I've already thought it through enough to satisfy my sense of how things should be. In any given week, I don't think about it at all.
Later, I emailed a thread from Nome the Barbarian, on neurodivergence, survival, and "overthinking".
Since I was currently coughing, and the GP's office didn't have the exam room ready yet, I was asked to wait out in my car. I waited for 15 minutes past the intended exam start time, and poked my head in to see if it was ready yet just about when they were going to call me.
I approved of the medical assistant's llamas, but did not care for the puzzle pieces.
My GP was going to be out of town soon, but she agreed that coughing out blood was not a good symptom, looked gravely at my series of photos of handkerchiefs, and learned about Valley Fever. Which the CDC has a page for, because it's not widely known. (I lived, as we recall, in the Phoenix metro area, which has dust.) https://www.cdc.gov/fungal/diseases/coccidioidomycosis/index.html So I figured that she should know about the possibility.
She examined my prophylactic bottle of penicillin (that I was given in case a particular dental operation went badly, and that I didn't need to start), allowed as how it was entirely reasonable that I would bring it up, but she wanted to hit whatever was going on with a Z-pak. And she was ordering labs: I should go get them done today. Including the chest x-ray.
I stopped in the restroom on my way out, and was derailed by the emergency pull cord being wrapped around the railing. (Again. Still.) I took photos. I also set my post-exam information sheets down. I went off to the adjacent lab, cringed when I got gendered, gave two tubes of blood for testing, and headed off to my car to make the call for the x-ray appointment.
And ran back inside to get the post-exam papers, which I'd left in the restroom.
By this time it was after 4pm, and I had a bit of a small tizzy with the x-ray scheduler, but it turned out I didn't need to go home to get any paperwork, I could just show up in any lab. And I got the directions to one particular one with plentiful parking.
I arrived about five minutes before closing, and of course all the lab techs had gone home. I was redirected to the ER. (My GP wanted this done TODAY, and I am of course coughing out blood.)
I take the time to IM the group chat that contains partners, housemate, and kid. I request Belovedest to go pick up my prescription (the pharmacy closes at 7) because I'm not sure how long this-all is going to take. My overwhelming emotion at this point is that a) I want someone with me to navigate all this, and I won't be getting one at any point in the immediate future, b) I feel a lot like I did in 2016, staring down the long tube of Miscellaneous Uterus Disease and Operation, and c) at least I have someone who can pick up the pills and probably make dinner happen, which I would have had to arrange for myself back in 2016. (Though I did get excellent help from family around the actual surgical date, which was good.)
The entrance I pick is not a good one, despite the lady in Building C saying that I should take entrance # whatever and walk within the building from there. I am redirected around front, and detour twice to doors that are locked. After regretting that I ever had legs, I arrive in the ER. I present my paperwork and declare that the regular imaging place is closed, and since I am coughing out blood, my GP would like this done today. This is seen as entirely reasonable. What is not happening is the ability to send me back to the ER's imaging department. The receptionist takes off her mask to call Imaging. Oh, because the x-ray was already marked as complete? Because I checked in to building C but then it turned out the techs were gone? (No, I did not even give my name there, but it is less energy to let her steamroller her assumptions all over, and I suspect it was marked completed in the lab adjacent to my GP. Which doesn't even have an x-ray machine anymore.) OK, issue a new order. (My medical-labs-adjacent partner <> cringed at that bit.)
The imaging tech showed up, and calmly interviewed me as we walked towards that department. I was shown to a cubicle and removed bra, necklace, pin, and anything else that could have been metal and above the waist or below the chin. (I did not get the ball-bearing stickers for my nipples this time.)
Two poses and we were done. I re-dressed, then wrote a message of praise on the whiteboard that seemed to be there for their management to pass along encouragement. I was back out to the parking lot through more big empty hallways, and back in my car. It had taken a surprisingly short amount of time.
I changed plans: I was going to go pick up my prescription, and Belovedest could be in charge of finding food. Call me with any questions. Belovedest rung me as I was about to arrive at the pharmacy, and we discussed pizza options.
Thursday morning, the cough was still present but the blood was not. The cough has been diminishing since then. I called Billing and confirmed that even though I'm on the payment plan that I'm on, that I was only being billed the once. Test results started to come in. Chest x-ray: clear. Bloodwork: the person covering for my GP says it's clear, but I see one abnormal result in the list. I look up that value, and I see that it being elevated can be a sign of allergies, fungal infection, cancer, Cushing's disease ...
... so, probably allergies. Which I have. A lot of. My GP comes back on the 6th, I think. We can discuss after that.
Friday was April Fool's Day, which I normally celebrate, but I just had no energy for that. Belovedest's day off, so I re-did the shopping list, updated my PineTime firmware, and we did A Shopping. My favorite April Fool of the few I did see was SkratchLabs: would you like to book time with their labs to meet your sports goals? These three labrador retrievers are standing by! Alas, no real doggos, but some adorable stickers that the first N orders would get. Aww.
Saturday I was feeling perky enough to even go afield and check out the free leftovers of a yard sale. I found some stuff and had a good chat with Nora. The update from the condo zone: it's a bad fit for multiple people visiting at night, alas, not without carpool arrangements.
Sunday involved a lot of interior design discussion with Ev. Theoretical for now, but we have established that a nice sturdy Twin XL frame with good clearance underneath, and a Twin XL trundle, is what we'd want, and then we could make it up as a daybed.
Today is Monday. I did my "homework" before seeing my psych, which is filling in my sleep chart. (He really likes my sleep chart; he says it's laid out well and easy to understand.) We're leaving my sleep meds as-is, since I'm sleeping better and have not had another "red" night since hitting the current dose, and we are fucking with my Strattera again.
Or, well, we WOULD be, but the pharmacy texted while we were getting my Toaster refueled. The thing's on backorder. So I'll stick at the current dose for a little while, maybe if I have some leftovers I can poke at the thing, and I'll see him in another month.
I realized that perhaps I had not told Mama and Tay about the coughing out blood thing, after mentioning the fact to Belovedest's Fishie and getting yelled at in Internet Stepchild. The upshot of that yelling-at was an invitation to the group chat in which I announced the thing, because I was too wiped out to broadcast any more widely. So far Mama and Tay have not responded to that, but it's also pretty late and I'm the night owl here.