State of the Alex: healthwork
Aug. 10th, 2016 10:33 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kaberettI started a new antidepressant on Monday. I'm at 20mg of fluoxetine, and will be going back in a month to discuss increasing the dose (or sooner if it seems sensible, or if my GP calls me anyway, which he might). I have not had a round of BV since first dropping my mirtazapine dose, I'm pretty sure, despite having done a bunch of the activities that were previously trigger points for it. So that's an enormous relief. But the combination of being undermedicated for depression and spending a lot of time in lab over the past few weeks (and consequently a lot of time commuting) is a large part of the reason I've not been around so much.
I saw respiratory medicine a week ago, for my first appointment, and it was promising in several respects. They started out by running me through a whole bunch of tests -- I was sent down for a chest X-ray, and put through spirometry, before actually going in to talk to them.
Some take-homes: my chest X-ray is completely normal, which means I have probably won the Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome scar-healing lottery -- I already knew I healed scars weirdly, in that things that barely break the skin scar a lot and last for a couple years but actual cuts or scrapes barely scar at all, and very few scars actually last on me, but the fact that the scarring from winter 2011's pneumonia just... is no longer visible, coupled with the fact that the pain I'd been getting in that region of the lung when coughing had been steadily decreasing and has now vanished, is... yeah. Pervasive small-scale scarring previously visible might have been people misinterpreting blood vessels or, similarly, might in fact have been that I was getting a lot of exposure at the point that X-ray was taken and have subsequently been much more careful. Next steps are to keep a peak flow diary for two months, get a full lung function test, see what the results of the bloods they ordered were (I'm not anaemic -- the A&E I was admitted to a couple of months ago checked that because my oxygen sats were dropping below 90 because of the amount of pain I was in -- but they're also checking whether my IgE levels are elevated), and whittle things down from there. They're not willing to give me a CT scan because I'm young and it's a high radiation dose, but they were very emphatic that obviously I am having these symptoms and they're affecting me and mitigating that matters. It seems likely I'll end up with a diagnosis of hyerresponsive airways, but they want to rule everything else out first, so.
They've also solved a problem I didn't even know I had, via giving me nasal steroids. So that's a thing.
Gynaecology: ultrasound results not yet with my GP. I'm going back in a month and we'll talk about them then, or if there's anything particularly exciting in them he'll give me a ring. (There won't be.)
Pain clinic information session: less dire than I expected. Individual assessment as to whether I'm a good candidate for the group course to follow sometime in September.
Physio: still making improvements, though I'm (as expected) really struggling to manage the amount of physio I'm supposed to be doing with actually going into work, i.e. I've become much more inconsistent about compliance, which is vicious-spiralling slightly because of the associated increase in difficulty of doing the things. Nonetheless, podiatry are expecting to discharge me at my next appointment in September because of how much I've improved with them, and I think that's the right decision; chasing up physio for the rest of me is on the todo list but just... hasn't happened yet.
I saw respiratory medicine a week ago, for my first appointment, and it was promising in several respects. They started out by running me through a whole bunch of tests -- I was sent down for a chest X-ray, and put through spirometry, before actually going in to talk to them.
Some take-homes: my chest X-ray is completely normal, which means I have probably won the Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome scar-healing lottery -- I already knew I healed scars weirdly, in that things that barely break the skin scar a lot and last for a couple years but actual cuts or scrapes barely scar at all, and very few scars actually last on me, but the fact that the scarring from winter 2011's pneumonia just... is no longer visible, coupled with the fact that the pain I'd been getting in that region of the lung when coughing had been steadily decreasing and has now vanished, is... yeah. Pervasive small-scale scarring previously visible might have been people misinterpreting blood vessels or, similarly, might in fact have been that I was getting a lot of exposure at the point that X-ray was taken and have subsequently been much more careful. Next steps are to keep a peak flow diary for two months, get a full lung function test, see what the results of the bloods they ordered were (I'm not anaemic -- the A&E I was admitted to a couple of months ago checked that because my oxygen sats were dropping below 90 because of the amount of pain I was in -- but they're also checking whether my IgE levels are elevated), and whittle things down from there. They're not willing to give me a CT scan because I'm young and it's a high radiation dose, but they were very emphatic that obviously I am having these symptoms and they're affecting me and mitigating that matters. It seems likely I'll end up with a diagnosis of hyerresponsive airways, but they want to rule everything else out first, so.
They've also solved a problem I didn't even know I had, via giving me nasal steroids. So that's a thing.
Gynaecology: ultrasound results not yet with my GP. I'm going back in a month and we'll talk about them then, or if there's anything particularly exciting in them he'll give me a ring. (There won't be.)
Pain clinic information session: less dire than I expected. Individual assessment as to whether I'm a good candidate for the group course to follow sometime in September.
Physio: still making improvements, though I'm (as expected) really struggling to manage the amount of physio I'm supposed to be doing with actually going into work, i.e. I've become much more inconsistent about compliance, which is vicious-spiralling slightly because of the associated increase in difficulty of doing the things. Nonetheless, podiatry are expecting to discharge me at my next appointment in September because of how much I've improved with them, and I think that's the right decision; chasing up physio for the rest of me is on the todo list but just... hasn't happened yet.