🏷️ health

So I call the doctors office again and get to talk to the secretary again. She tells me they are going to put me on Asacol 3 pills/3 times a day. So I call back and ask if I could also take a gluten or lactose intolerance test and she says, "Oh we don't do that here" So I ask her where and she doesn't know. So I call my "primary care" physician and he says there is no way they could have cme up with IBS from a CAT scan. SO SOMEONE IS FUCKING LYING - WHO IS IT?

He suggests I go to see the GI doctor. Which is exactly who I was looking for when I called the first doctor (a colon /rectal specialist) and asked him for a referal. He told me to just come to him and thats how I ended up in CT scan land. Now I have an appointment set for Feb 5th. By then I should be dead or crazy.

I guess I will just take the medicine and see if it helps. @terry says it doesn't seem dangerous.

Well good news is they didn't say it was cancer but it is IBS or irritable bowel syndrome. What the fuck does that really mean. We don't know what is causing it but you bowel is irritated. No fucking surprise considering I have been complaining about that for about a month straight.

My favorite part of the wiki article

Misdiagnosis
Anecdotal accounts exist of poor patient outcomes due to treatable causes of diarrhea being mis-diagnosed as IBS. Common examples include infectious diseases, celiac disease,[5] and lactose intolerance.[6]

None of which I have been tested for. Still no stool sample, no bloodwork, no lactose intolelrance test, no test for celliac.

I guess I will go on one of those crazy nothing but rice and vegetable diets and adds stuff back into my diet to see if it help. Right now basically everything I eat goes right through me after getting a little bit bloody somewhere. Ya, gross I know. There is no consistency to anything I eat and everything makes my stomach ache.

I seriously am going to go crazy. And the lack of sufficient bathroom facilities at my work make it way worse.

I am thinking it is time to switch to a natural doctor for a bit and see how that goes. At this point I am willing to try anything to make it stop.

The molson ice hot water 40oz
Last night I made a hot water bottle for my stomach out of a molson 40oz beer bottle. It really helped. Maybe I should market them with little beer cozies?

So at 3PM I get the CT scan at Buffalo general. I have to go there at 1PM though. I am so excited on one hand about finding anything out and so scared on the other hand about finding anything out and so scared on yet another hand about the radiation.

So my abdominal area just keeps getting worse and I am really sick to my stomach. It is not normal to have to go to the bathroom like 5 times during the night.

I got up at 8:45 to schedule the abdominal CT, as at this point I would do anything to find out what is wrong. They told me they had two locations. Buffalo General and one in Wiliamville. I told her Buffalo general was better and she said she would call me back when she schedules. At 9:20 I still had n word so I called the doctors office back and said I would gladly drive to Williamsville if it was faster,easier I could get in sooner because my stomach is killing. She said she would call me back. Here we are one hour later, still no freakin' word.

I seriously, cannot believe how this is going for. In the mean time i don't know if I should try and eat anything or not because what if you need to have an empty stomach for it and it is today and then I have to reschedule. I wish it would render me unconscious at this point.

And then there is some unreasonable deadline at work that I am working against which normally is fun for me, but this time it is making me crazy because I am sick.

Now what I really want is a test for celiac disease just to rule that out in case and what about the blood and stool tests. Why none of them yet? Looks like for me they are going to skip to step 5.

Diagnostic Tests for Crohn's disease

Test for Crohn's disease

* Physical examination
* Complete blood count - for anemia and white blood cell counts
* Stool sample analysis
* Upper GI series - barium X-rays
* Lower GI series - barium X-rays

Holy crap. So I was having all this pain in my lower right side today and it was really sharp. So I decided to look up those symptoms and realized I have like almost every symptom of appendicitis.

Maybe that is what the CT scan @paul #42555 is to check for, but really I would almost rather just have it out.

What Are the Symptoms of Appendicitis?

The classic symptoms of appendicitis include:

* Dull pain near the navel or the upper abdomen that becomes sharp as it moves to the lower right abdomen. This is usually the first sign.
* Loss of appetite
* Nausea and/or vomiting soon after abdominal pain begins <-- I have been really nauseas although I haven't thrown up - I seriously never throw up though, even when drunk or with the flu
* Abdominal swelling
* Fever of 99° F to 102° F <-- this is the only one I don't have, I should check when I get home
* Inability to pass gas
* Painful urination
* Severe cramps
* Constipation or diarrhea with gas
* Dull or sharp pain anywhere in the upper or lower abdomen, back or rectum

I ate beef burgundy at work tonight and baked lamb legs with potatoes for dinner last night.

The abdominal CAT scan. So the doctors office called to say he wanted me to go get an abdominal CAT scan. Hm, I know I am probably just be a crazy but are they safe? I mean it seems like a lot of radiation. I know I had one before when I was about 17ish and I have had about 3 chest Xrays in my life. So should I worry about this? There are so many sites that make it seem really dangerous. On the other hand I am tired of my stomach hurting?



here is a quote from CBS news. Now I realize that I am not getting a full body CT just an abdominal one but --

It's not a huge risk, especially for someone with symptoms of a dangerous condition. But when used to screen healthy people for hidden evidence of disease, the risk may outweigh the benefit. And if a healthy person gets repeated full-body scans, cancer risks multiply, Brenner and colleague Carl D. Elliston report in the September issue of Radiology.

"The risks from a single full-body CT scan are not large: If 1,200 45-year-old people got one, you might expect one to die from radiation-induced cancer," Brenner tells WebMD. "But if you are thinking of doing this on a regular basis, as a routine screening modality, then the radiation doses start to add up and the risks then start to get quite high."

One abdominal CT, says the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), exposes a patient to 500 times more radiation than a conventional chest x-ray.

Yes, believe it or not for the last four hours I have had no stomach ache and that includes eating Pizza and wings, something I almost never eat because I am afraid it will make me sick. Maybe the intestinal bacteria pills I am taking help, or maybe it is just a freak moment.

I am so tired of feeling sick to my stomach. I keeps me up all night. It hurts all day. It kind of even makes me nauseous. I went to the doctor, he asked where it hurt. I misrepresented because I was bloated and my whole stomach kind of hurt at the moment. Now that I didn't eat last night and am really skinny I can tell it hurts higher up. See my diagram below. The green area has a much sharper pain when I touch it. The red area kind of hurts when I am really full but I think it has more to do with whatever is up in area green.



So I call the doctor yesterday and got his helper because he was busy. I said, I don't want to just wait for Jan 9th to get a colonoscopy and asked if they could do any other tests bfore. I asked if it would be possible to get a blood test or stool test to see if something else is up. At least a freaking blood test. The last one I took was in like 2000. Anyways, so they say they could fit me in at 6am for colonoscopy. I declined first of all because I would have had to be ready at like 5am at Millard Fillmore suburban and second of all because I wasn't calling for a rush colonoscopy. I just think maybe they should check some other stuff first.

I am really so sick of the whole process. What does it take to find a doctor with a few minutes who thinks of a the whole picture? I would pay lots of money at this point. I think I am going to just take @jenks's advice and just go to the emergency room. I think I am going to go today after I finish with some important stuff for work. If I go there I will blog the whole experience.

I have this horrible feeling I am going to die soon. Could be the return of the migraine or the non-stomach stomach pain or the shoulder pain or all of it combined. Feeling sick all the time is really, really bad. If this turns out to be some long term I feel like this for the rest of my life thing, I don't know if I can handle it.

It's like all this skeletal pain mixed with intestinal pain.

I can't figure it out. Nothing particular makes me sick when I eat. Actually, the eating part is good, as is after. It is the when I have not eaten part that is really bad. My intestines get all bloated and my stomach starts making crazy noises. Between that and the noise my neck/shouler make now - I sound so broken.

I have finally made a doctors appointment with my cousin who is a gastrointestinal specialist for next week. I wish it was tomorrow, but tomorrow I am busy with the dumbness that is my life. I decided to forgo the primary care physician with the hope he can suggest one. I seriously just can't wait anymore. I am sure that will mean the stupid health insurance will not cover my visit but maybe it will because I went to him before. If it doesn't I am going to switch to another company just out of spite.

What is it going to be? What, and how did I go from feeling relatively fine to totally broken so fast. Could it be a lack of Vitamin D from my almost zero sun exposure this year?

This is interesting . I guess I shoulod be fit considering I walk "30 minutes a day, five days a week" I don't feel fit.

I have all these pictures I want to post but I can't move my head around enough to go get the camera.

I went to Patrick Oneill Chiropractic on Bidwell in order to get my neck fixed as per my previous post. I just did it on a whim. I had never been to a chiropractor before and had no real idea of what it was going to be like. No one recommended him to me. I just saw the sign on his office.



It seems to have fixed my neck. Even the Chiropractor wouldn't believe it. Seriously, it made such a difference.

Here's the hitch. I went back today for a follow up and it didn't do anything new. Then he asked to schedule another appointment for next week but now I am feeling diminishing returns. So I ask myself, is going the first time like getting high the first time when you are a kid and then you always try to go back to that place but never can until you just give up or die. If that is the case then I would just quit now before I have to deal with years of chiropractic costs - not that it is very expensive.

$50 for the first appointment and $35 for follow-ups.