The northlondonhippy

Archive for May, 2009

Its not lost on me that I haven’t posted any­thing here in an absolute age and a half. I’m all too aware of it.

I haven’t been so well for the last cou­ple of weeks. Hey ho.

I’m wait­ing for the results of another blood test, that I had been putting off, but a few days ago, I had a cou­ple of litres sucked out of my arm.

Ok, it seemed like litres, I didn’t look. I don’t like blood, espe­cially my own if its not deep inside my veins.

The rea­son I’ve been putting it off is because my reg­u­lar GP of nearly a dozen years is now on long-term sick leave and get­ting a blood test meant see­ing a brand new doctor.

The new doc­tor and I didn’t get off to a great start. He took my blood pres­sure using some fancy auto­mated gizmo and when he checked the read­ing, the expres­sion on his face told me it wasn’t good.

My mother suf­fered from high blood pres­sure, took med­ica­tion for it and was mon­i­tored reg­u­larly. With that in mind, I’ve always kept a close eye on mine, and thank­fully it has con­sis­tently been low, 110/70 which for an over­sized, middled-aged smoker is pretty damn good.

The elec­tronic gizmo was show­ing 170/110, which is not good. Its about as far from good as you can be, its “call an ambu­lance now” good.

I was incred­u­lous of this read­ing straight away and told him I’m con­sis­tently 110/70, young doc­tor new guy looked like he going to shit him­self. I asked him to take it again with an old style, man­ual sphygmomanometer.

He had to go find one and I was momen­tar­ily left alone, my mind rac­ing to the obvi­ous, yet slim pos­si­bil­ity that some­thing changed with my blood pressure.

It could explain why I was feel­ing so shitty again.

The new doc­tor guy returned with an old-school blood pres­sure cuff, quickly wrapped it around my arm then pumped the squeezey ball for all he was worth. As he let the air out and took the read­ing, his con­cerned expres­sion relaxed into a very slight grin and I knew it was fine.

And that’s all he said, “its fine”. He didn’t even share the cor­rect, final score with me and I think I know why.

It was 110/70, just like I told him it should and would be.

Doc­tors don’t like it when you know more than they do, even if it is some­thing as per­sonal as your own damn blood pres­sure. Espe­cially, younger, inex­pe­ri­enced and inse­cure doc­tors, like this one, who I unin­ten­tion­ally put on his back foot.

It would have been eas­ier if he just got it right the first time, but that’s true of just about every­thing any­one gets wrong, ever.

I told him I had Hashimoto’s and needed to get my thy­roid lev­els checked, though I said “T4 lev­els” just to be snarky and this time it was inten­tional. To be fair, this was right after he told me smok­ing cig­a­rettes was bad for me, like he was the first per­son to share that par­tic­u­lar pearl of wisdom.

“Well, gee whil­lik­ers, doc, they’re bad for you? I did not know that. Next you’re gonna tell me unpro­tected anal sex with crack whores is bad for me! I did not know that, either.”

He asked me what my symp­toms were and I told him: breath­less­ness, like try­ing to catch your breath on a cold day with­out any exer­tion, very occa­sional, but notice­able heart pal­pi­ta­tions, alter­nat­ing sweats and chills, a big lack of energy and worst of all, my back prob­lems have returned.

When I men­tioned my back prob­lem, he looked at me quizzi­cally and I had to explain to him how I was suf­fer­ing from inflam­ma­tion in the joints of my spine, which were light­ing up nerves in my leg, sci­atic really. I had to go to explain that one of the symp­toms of Hashimoto’s is inflamed joints as attrib­uted by my reg­u­lar GP last summer.

All of this started last sum­mer when my back gave out and for around a fort­night I could barely walk. I got over it and haven’t had any real back prob­lems since, just the occa­sional, iso­lated twinge, but noth­ing of any concern.

Until about 2 weeks ago, when I started get­ting severe pain shoot­ing down my right leg, mainly in bed and bad enough to wake me up. I haven’t really slept more than 3 con­tin­u­ous hours since then, though often I wake up, put an ice pack on my back, or take a hor­ri­ble codeine pill or both, and go back to sleep.

I saw my chi­ro­prac­tor three times last week, which improved it slightly. Since then, I’ve worked a cou­ple of nights and its become bad again. Sit­ting in a shitty office chair for 12 hours will do that to you.

And because of the bank hol­i­day week­end, I can’t see my chi­ro­prac­tor again until Tues­day, which is also bad.

Moan, moan, moan, I’m just a big hippy baby.

I left the doctor’s office with a blood test form, with more boxes checked than I ever thought pos­si­ble, hence the litres of blood extracted. He’s run­ning every test imag­in­able, which is cool, but he did it out of fear, not because he thought there was any­thing par­tic­u­larly wrong with me.

He didn’t really answer my ques­tion about the pos­si­bil­ity of my thy­roid lev­els drop­ping again, requir­ing an increase in my daily dose of levothy­rox­ine. I don’t think he knew the answer. I don’t know either, but right now, its my best and only guess.

I was told by my reg­u­lar (and much missed) GP, that once my dosage was adjusted prop­erly, I would “feel like a new per­son”. That hasn’t hap­pened yet and I’ve reached the point where I don’t think I ever will.

Yep, all of this has me down. I am bored with hav­ing health prob­lems, its tedious always being asked with deep con­cern “how are you? no really, how are you?” I know peo­ple mean it and its not that I don’t appre­ci­ate their con­cern, I just don’t like hav­ing to answer it over and over again.

Mainly I’m bored with feel­ing like shit all the time. Its mak­ing me think all sorts of things, like: this is my life now, my best days are behind me, I’ve achieved noth­ing with my life.

All sorts of uplift­ing shit, really!

Just check out the title of this post, “Run­ning out the clock”. That’s kind of a downer, isn’t it? Now that you know the context.

That’s how I feel right now, like I am just run­ning out the clock, on those last few decades/years/months/days/hours/minutes/seconds (delete as appro­pri­ate) that I have left.

It doesn’t mat­ter if its true, I mean of course its true, its true for every­one, but what mat­ters I guess is that its how I feel right now. And I don’t feel like I have decades or years.

I should point out I have no med­ical evi­dence to sug­gest I am going to die any time soon and in actual fact, ratio­nally I don’t believe I am going to die any time soon. I’m still talk­ing about how I feel.

Emo­tion­ally.

Now, this is the part where I’m sup­posed to remind you (and myself) that I’ve always been a sur­vivor and blah blah, I’ve come through this and I’ve come through that, but again that’s not how I feel.

I feel like I haven’t got any fight left in me, but that’s prob­a­bly just the Hashimoto’s talk­ing. I really do feel like my energy is zapped most of the time and doing the sim­plest things takes tremen­dous amounts of effort.

With that in mind, think how daunt­ing any­thing com­plex must seem to me at the moment, like nego­ti­at­ing my way through the NHS to a bet­ter diag­no­sis and treatment.

Either I need a sim­ple adjust­ment to my thy­roid meds or some­thing else is wrong. I can just about cope with another increase in my dosage and the addi­tional tests required, but any­thing more than that and I don’t think I can be bothered.

Happy days.

I liked it bet­ter when I was the king of fun, but if I am going to get nos­tal­gic, I might as well lament over how much I miss my beloved fresh and legal magic mush­rooms and I still curse the gov­ern­ment for ban­ning them.

What’s the con­nec­tion? Right now, I would really ben­e­fit from a decent, old fash­ioned shroom trip. An after­noon shroomed to the gills would do more for me than 10 years of psy­chother­apy ever could. And it would be cheaper, too.