Last week was weird
So, I'm offline as I'm writing this but I'm 99% certain I mentioned here that I had a breast biopsy last Monday (25 March). That hasn't come back yet. I'm writing this the following Friday. I have a patient-portal account with the local hospital system, and lab results hit there before my doctor's even called me, but nada so far.
Two days after my biopsy, my father had his regular lab appointment. He is a type 2 diabetic (he's early seventies and the first I knew he had the disease, he was in his forties, to give you an idea) in stage three kidney failure and he's had some cardiovascular issues over the years. By some miracle, because I don't think anyone really makes the effort to educate him on his conditions, he's managed to get to his seventies with his sight, kidneys, and all four limbs intact. He's worked out in his own mind that if he just eats less, his sugars will be normal and his kidney failure progress will slow down. He's sort of right (he manages fasting levels of around 100 mg/dl when his doc allowed him an upper limit of 130... do not get me started), but he'd really slow it down if he understood that it's not really about food quantity. Problem is he's really picky, and even with foods he likes he is pretty rigid about how he eats them. So it is just as well that his opinion about managing his disease is sort of two doors down the street from the approach he actually needs. It's bought him some time.
Anyway, so he goes in Wednesday for his labs and we went on a couple errands after that and then went home. As I've mentioned a bazillion times, we're in a dead spot for cell signal. Sometimes we can get calls at home, sometimes we get calls but can't actually have a conversation with the caller, and sometimes they don't even hear the ring from our end because we're dropped out of the system. But somehow Dad's sister got a hold of him and let him know the hospital was trying to get a hold of him. Something was wrong with his labs. So back to the hospital we went.
Long story short, they've doubled his sodium bicarbonate dose and he has to take it more often. Did you know baking soda was one of the treatments for kidney failure? True story. They dispense it in pills. So that was nice and weird.
Also, he's still in stage three. We were all, including him, dreading his having to start dialysis. He hates going to the doctor at the best of times, dialysis is not the best of times, and he'd have just been miserable. So thank goodness we get to delay that a while longer.
But that whole adventure stretched out over three days. Either I was in town seeing him or I was here "enjoying" the shit signal too late in the day to feel comfortable going to my friend's house. So that's why there was nothing on Friday.
BUT WAIT, THERE'S MORE
Whilst I was sitting in Dad's hospital room, on my phone, digging through my patient portal looking for my goddamn biopsy results, I ran across the EKG the hospital took for my preadmit paperwork for the colonoscopy two weeks ago.
Apparently there are signs that I have had an infarction in the lower part of my heart at some point and it's showing up on the EKG.
dafuq
I took the specific term they used and googled it and yeah, it's associated with the usual heart-disease suspects, but it can also be triggered by things like broken-heart syndrome. I can think of a few times in the past few years where something might have gone wrong. Not wrong enough to kill me or even hospitalize me, but wrong enough for me to sort of freak out in the back of my mind and then shove it down because I had too much shit on my plate and at various points either I didn't want to be at my daughter's father's "mercy," or I had no insurance, or I was going to lose my room (when I lived in a weekly-rate motel) if I took a lot of time off to get looked at, or what-have-you. The thing is, I've had weird symptoms now and again as far back as my late teens or early twenties, and I thought it was just weirdness triggered by weird things (those weird symptoms were why I gave up most daquiris and all wine coolers -- don't ask right now), so when more weird shit came up when I was under major stress, I figured it was more of the same. Or high blood pressure, which in me is triggered by big pain or big stress, and I definitely went through the latter lots and lots over the past two and a halfish years. So I didn't think anything of it. I knew that women have different heart-attack symptoms, but I figured a real heart attack would lay me out. Shows what I know.
COVID could also be the cause. Nothing I read said anything about that, but it's caused other kinds of heart damage in infected people. I have no idea if we can even find out. I got COVID in September '22, during one of my uninsured periods.
(Yes, I was vaccinated when the vaccines came out. Any of you decide to be clowns about that in my comments, you're getting the boot. I would be more receptive to crazy vaccine "theories" if ANY of you offered realistic alternative strategies to prevent people getting sick, but your preferred approach is infecting them and letting them die. Miss me with ALL that shit.)
Given that when my nurse practitioner diagnosed me with diabetes the first thing she did was put me on a drug and did not prescribe me a glucose meter (yes, they're OTC now, but that's money I don't have), given that it's been over a week since my preadmit and no one has said anything about the abnormal EKG, given that when I looked up inferior infarction (or something like that) there was no explanation that was benign (in fact, I'm at greater risk of a serious event now), my main fear with bringing this up with my NP is that everyone will pooh-pooh it off because it's cheaper to let me die accidentally on purpose. Hooray for fucking Medicaid.
I'll bring it up with the NP anyway because I want answers, and I know that if I say nothing I definitely won't get answers. I just fucking hate feeling like speaking up might do no good whatsoever.
The catch-22 is that maybe exercise would improve the situation, but (1) exercise will not bring back dead heart muscle, if I have that now; (2) exercise will not unclog arteries, one of the major causes of this specific type of infarction (heart attacks are not always caused by clogged arteries); (3) people drop dead of vigorous exercise all the time. I kind of need to find out how much stress my heart can take at this point, and I can't do that if they go "oh, that EKG is no big deal." I doubt Medicaid would pay for me to do a cardiac stress test for funsies.
Welcome to "medicine" in America, I guess.
My NP is already threatening to put me on a statin, which is also recommended for this infarction thing. Well, guess what. You know how I'm always harping on about sex being important and sex differences being real? Last I knew, they have not found any benefit to putting women on a statin if we've never had a heart attack. "But what about your EKG, Dana?" I'm not sure they've found benefit even if we have had a heart attack. Most drug research that goes to human studies is done on men, EVEN NOW. And even in men they find that statins wreck muscle tissue (I already have wrecked muscle tissue IN MY HEART, apparently -- let's add MORE!) and brain function. Just what I fucking need right now.
...
On the plus side, I won a prize on each of two one-dollar lottery scratchoff tickets (first a free ticket, then four dollars off the free ticket) and then, while Dad was in the hospital, I was at Walmart picking up something-or-other, looked down, and spied a twenty-dollar bill on the floor next to the self-check register. As I realize what I am seeing an employee walks by and says, "Oh, you dropped your money!" In the mood I was in, it was a good fucking job it was $20 and not $100.
Odd counterbalance to everything else. I want to wish for the Powerball instead, which jackpot was nearly a billion dollars again by the end of that weird week (this is getting to being rote rather than amazing, innit?), but I'm afraid of knocking my situation out of cosmic whack.
I will say this: winning nearly a billion, even if I only get to keep half of it, would go a long way to getting me decent treatment. And not just medical. And wouldn't that be a switch.
Which means it won't happen, but it's nice to think about.
Okay. Enough oversharing for now. I have more in the pipeline and you'll be seeing all that soon. Cheers.
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EDIT: I'm now at the library and about to upload this, and since I'm on my laptop AND connected to the internet, I did a little more digging on my EKG summary. I don't know enough to investigate all aspects of the EKG and those wiggly lines mean nothing to me, but I did google the number values listed in the results text. I can't see what led them to say "maybe inferior infarct," but I did discover that my QT interval is short. Exercise can shorten the QT interval, but I don't exercise. (I know. I hope to change that, but we are going to make absolutely sure I won't kill myself doing it first.) The other possibility is short-QT syndrome, and my QT interval falls within range for that. I haven't read a whole lot about it at this point because I've got stuff to do, like schedule more posts here, but some of the things I have read make me wonder if perhaps that might not be an issue for me. It's genetically inherited, at any rate. They won't have to guess whether I have it if Medicaid will pay for the genetic testing to find out. My bet's on "no," but perhaps I can find out how to best cope with the condition if we assume I have it.
Fun!
Also. Day 7: Still no biopsy results.
Okay. Off to schedule stuff. Thanks for "listening" to me ramble.