Wednesday, June 17, 2009

Logjam

I haven't been on here for several days because with the start of summer everything at our house seemed to pile up like a mess of logs going downriver. But overall, a happy mess.

Besides the annual picnics, festivals, yardwork, extra socialising, Father's Day, & all that normally takes place in early summer, our family is gearing up for a big bash celebrating my father's 90th birthday, with relatives coming from far and away.
He and his wife are also moving to a retirement village some 20 miles away in a few weeks, so that's another thing, and we have a total of 7 or 8 other b.day celebrations featuring friends or family coming up in the next few weeks.

I love birthdays but I hate that, "Now what would be the perfect gift for this dearly beloved individual?" feeling, don't you? I end up overshopping, never finding that one ideal item I wish would express all the positive thoughts and feelings I have for the giftee, and end up buying a gift card at the last sec. If Mother had thought ahead she might have named me Good Intentions.

I have had a medical crisis of sorts as well, which I am trying to decide how to handle. In March a case of flu went into pneumonia and uncontrolled asthma, sending me to the ER one scary crack of dawn. The doc there said since I was over 50 & couldn't breathe, it was hospital protocol to require a CT scan to check for pulmonary emboli. Ok, did that. There were no clots but a couple wks. later my asthma doc's nurse called and said a "pulmonary nodule" (???) had been seen on the scan so I needed a followup. Having never heard of that I immediately went into a spasm of terror. But, she said, it was most likely "nothing", or scarring from the pneumonia. People walk around with all kinds of stuff inside them that they never know about until it is incidentally discovered by a test for something else.

I am the world's foremost living medical chicken and scared to death of even having my blood pessure taken (it hurts! oh yes it does!) But I also don't want to die of the Dread Malignant Exploding Pulmonary Nodules, so I agreed to the followup scan which I had last week.

Yesterday the results of that followup showed that the item in question was behaving itself and not growing or assuming odd postures or anything else suspect. But now get this! They want me to have another followup scan in October. How weird can this get?

It seems like I don't have anything wrong, but just in case I might have, even though the odds are way against it, I am supposed to keep getting a test that exposes my poor innocent lung tissue to higher and higher levels of carcinogenic radiation whilst at the same time flooding my vascular network with dye that is known to destroy human kidneys. How does this make sense?

All you papercrafting radiologists and specialists out there who read my blog (big LOL) (in fact, big HHH for har, har, har) should think this over and come up with an answer. I'll be a-waitin'!

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