Was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes in early January. Again, not a huge surprise, I mean, my lifestyle up to that point was pretty much optimized for it. Still, it responded really well to first-line treatment for the first couple of months and things were looking great on that front, so great I wasn't even going to mention it...

... until in early March I randomly had some blood work done for something completely unrelated (my MS med can cause liver damage, so I have to get that checked monthly), and my neurologist's nurse called and said "your liver function is fine, but your platelet count is really low, go to the emergency room right now."

So I did, and they gave me a four-day burst of my old friend dexamethasone to push the ol' platelets back up. Now, one thing you may not know about corticosteroids is that they make blood glucose go nuts, even if you're not diabetic. So we were expecting those numbers to go way up, and they did.

And never came back down.

So much for responding well to first-line treatment!

So that's... a thing. I haven't seen an endocrinologist yet, but I think that's on the way, because people don't normally go from "OK, this is in the bag, we don't even need to talk about insulin" to "what do you mean you can't get below 200?" in a week like that.

Oh yeah, and while that was happening, my resting heart rate decided it wanted to be 90 bpm. Resting. I spend every moment now feeling like I just arrived at a flat-out sprint, even if I've been sitting still for an hour. My blood pressure (which is normally low enough to annoy nurses) is similarly "oh wow!"-inspiring now. This is great! It's amazing experiencing the movie Crank in person for (checks watch) three weeks straight and counting. My chest feels like an animal is trying to escape.

As an early stage of trying to figure out what the fuck is going on, I went up to my local hospital to be fitted with the gadget for a 48-hour heart monitoring session today. When I got there, the nice cardio lady had this amazing cyberpunk-looking stuff all laid out on a table. She asked me to sit down and said she and her assistant were going to get me set up for my 30-day monitor.

"Thirty days?!" I squeaked. "They told me it would be 48 hours."

"Really?" she said, and called my doctor's office. After some confusion, they confirmed that yes, they meant for it to be 48 hours, they must have pushed the wrong button ordering it.

Visibly crestfallen, the cardio lady dismissed her assistant, put the cyberware back in its box and stashed it away in a cupboard, and got out a battered 1980s portable-radio-looking thing with a big sheaf of wires attached instead. The electrodes itch, I look like a suicide bomber, and I can't get wet until Saturday afternoon. Maybe I should've just kept quiet and let them go ahead with the 30-day cyberware install instead.

Nah. My luck, the insurance would have refused to cover it because it's the Wrong Thing and I'd have to pay for it.

Also, next month I have to shlep to Bangor two days in a row to have a Myocardial Perfusion Stress Test, which involves radioactive substances and a simulated dinosaur attack, yet is nowhere near as cool as any of that sounds. I've had one of those before, a few years ago when I thought I'd had a heart attack but it turned out I just had a terrible manager.

Ironically, this complete and unprovoked health collapse comes as I'm taking concrete and otherwise successful steps to get control of other aspects thereof. Last spring I looked into bariatric surgery and was rejected for same on the grounds that--I swear I am not making this up--I was too fat for it. Seriously, that's a thing! A person can have a body mass index so high the surgeons will turn you away for the operation that is the last resort of people with high BMI.

Well, fine. BMI is fucking voodoo anyway.

Upshot is, at the time the hospital in Bangor where I was looking at having the procedure done had a medical weight management program they shunted the rejects from surgical weight loss into, either as a way of getting their weight down to surgical candidacy levels or just as a straight-up alternative to surgery. So, after spending the entirety of last summer and fall waiting for a referral that got botched once and had to be repeated, I finally entered that program early this past winter and started working with a nice doctor who specializes in non-surgical weight management, as well as an equally nice clinical psychologist.

I don't want to get into specific numbers, but based on the scale time I cadged at the hospital today, I think I've taken off about 17 percent of what I really ought to, and a quarter of what I'd be pleased with, in the last... say four months? So that's pretty decent, except for the fact that I have all these other things that are now trying to, if not kill me, at least seriously piss me off for no obvious reason.

Also, I said the hospital had a medical weight management program because no sooner had I finally gotten through that interminable referral process than the management of the hospital group decided to get rid of it. The whole practice is closing next week. I had my last appointment with that doctor yesterday. The hospital has offered zero alternative support to the patients being dispossessed. I guess someone in upper management decided that Daddy* needed a new S-class more than MWM's patients needed care.

For the record, I'm not fishing for sympathy or support with this, I just thought you might like an update on what the heck's going on over here. It's a mix of the usual crap and some brand new crap! Life: it both comes at you fast and takes its time doing it. :)

--G.
* or Mommy, let's not be sexist
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.