Tag: illness

Catchups and closure (part 1)

– In which Dorn provides some updates on past posts.

D

orn’s mysterious illness

The good news about having a fancy city doctor is that they have access to esoteric information and equipment that the country folk might not have. The bad news is that it can take a long time to make use of it.

I had a six-week wait between when my new doctor identified my mystery illness (first described in this post) and when I could take the video capsule endoscopy that would confirm it. But the day finally came.

artist’s conception

They fitted me with a belt containing a receiver and a little TV monitor, and gave me a video camera pill to swallow. It was the size and shape of a large vitamin capsule, or a small Weeble, and one end had a clear dome, inside of which was a flashing strobe light and (I assume) a camera. I swallowed it and we watched it descend my throat on the little monitor. (And “no”, they said, “you can’t watch it progressing through your system all day. The monitor is just for the initial check.”)

Without the Dorn-cam to watch, the rest of the day was pretty dull. I was up near Baltimore, too far to drive home just to turn around and drive back for the procedure closeout. I wasn’t allowed to eat, drink, sleep, sit still, or exercise, so I went to the library for the day. At the end of the day, they took their receiver belt back and sent me home. They didn’t want the camera-pill back, and said I’d know when it was expelled. 

When I asked how to be sure the camera was really gone, they said they could order an xray of the area. That certainly didn’t seem very efficient to me. With the wonders of modern digital miniaturization, I figured they could make the capsule start beeping or something after 8 hours (or however long the expected transit time is). Or even better—it could vibrate! Then its presence would be announced more discreetly and more, um, agreeably. 

In a couple of days, the doc reported that the pictures had confirmed and located the damage in my intestine. Now I’ve got another procedure scheduled to send another Mars rover up and zap the problem (“zap” is apparently the technical term of art for the procedure). That will happen in another a few weeks. If anything interesting happens then, I’ll let you know. 

Rapper name

(Update of this post.) The same day as my internal video debut, in the parking garage by the library, I saw painted on one of the walls the logo of the 2015 Superbowl. It looked like an ad, but what it was doing on a concrete interior wall in Towson I have no idea, especially considering neither Baltimore nor any other local team was playing (it was, I think, the Seahawks v the Patriots). But what most caught my eye was the Roman designation for the 49th Superbowl: XLIX. 

Now there’s a rapper name for you: X-LIX! It sounds kind of naughty, vaguely demonic even, and it rolls off the tongue easily. And it sounds familiar, like a real word, even though it isn’t. 

The sound of the name reminded me of Bela Oxmyx (“OX-mix”), a space alien/south Chicago gangster who appeared in a 1968 episode of the original Star Trek series called “A Piece of the Action”. What a great episode, in which Mr Spock speaks that memorable line, “I’d advise youse to keep dialing, Oxmyx!”.

What a great show, in fact! I remember wanting to quit my Boy Scout troop because they insisted on meeting on Thursday evenings, when Star Trek came on. And in those days, children, if you didn’t see a TV show at the one time it was broadcast, you didn’t see it at all until six months later during summer reruns (which were also aired on Thursday evenings)! And there was no Youtube or social media to read about it, you just had to admit to your friends in school next day that you missed it, ask them what happened, and let them gloat. The kids these days, they don’t know how easy they’ve got it!

But oh, the horror! It’s occurred to me the real reason why the rapper name X-LIX sounds so familiar to me! It’s not Oxmyx at all, it’s that it is only one letter away from that constipation medicine Ex-Lax! Oh cruel fate! That’s the stereotypical old man medicine, and a death sentence for a hipster rapper wannabe! My rapper routine might as well consist of shuffling across the stage muttering about you young hooligans! while wearing my fuzzy slippers and a bathrobe over an “I’m for Joe” t-shirt. Oh well, can’t have that. The name search continues.

Side note: I’m noticing that the fraction of my posts that deal with my GI tract is disconcertingly high. If I had known things would trend this way, I might have thought twice about starting to blog at all (or about getting old). Still, “write what you know”, as they say.

Continued in part 2, with updates on my semi-vegetarian conversion and other news. 

Thanks!
Dorn
11-13-2019

A tale of four emergency rooms (conclusion)

– In which Dorn’s Mystery Illness is revealed. Sort of.

(This concludes the story started in Part 1, here).

ER VISIT 3.

I

t was a record-setting year for rain in 2018, and by summer our yard was saturated. Living right on the shore of the Chesapeake Bay, with the hills that in other places make up Calvert Cliffs right behind us, we were seeing a torrent coming down onto or property every time it rained, with more precipitation in the forecast. I was busy trying to divert some of this wash off of our back yard by digging a berm and supplementing that with sand bags. It was heavy work, and by the time I was done I was aching all over.

Big doses of Motrin helped.

I slept hard that night, but woke up in the middle of the night feeling funny. I was dizzy with cold sweats, faint-headed and a bit disoriented. I’ve never had a heart attack, but I didn’t want my first to be my last, so we high-tailed it to the emergency room again!

It wasn’t a heart attack, but the illness I was suffering from did seem to somehow involve a lot of bleeding into my GI tract. So they sent me home from the ER, with instructions to check in with my gastro­­enterologist (and my cardiologist, just in case).

The next day, I got an appointment with my GP, Dr B—. I told him I had already scheduled a colonoscopy in a couple of days, and a visit with my cardiologist a couple of days after that. He hit the roof! “You can’t go around getting a colonoscopy, or any other invasive procedure, until you get your heart checked out! Even if it wasn’t a heart attack, you still need to clear that first!!” When he wasn’t convinced that he was making his point strongly enough to me, he interrupted my consult to call my gastro­enterologist himself, and tell him not to poke me with anything until I’d gotten a clean bill from my cardiologist.

That’s what I like about Dr B—: he cares enough to get worked up if something’s going on that puts me at risk. The laconic country life is great for most things, but I had already learned (in part 1) that I like a little nervous tension in my medical relationships. I also like that if Dr B— doesn’t know something, he’ll tell me rather than pretend that he does. (What I don’t like so much is that there are things I wish he knew that he doesn’t. Like what was wrong with me.)

Anyway, I got a bunch of tests and scans (in the right order, with the cardiogram first), but nothing showed what was causing the GI bleeding. Over the next few months as these tests progressed, I slowly recovered, until finally my doctors and I concluded that the original culprit was probably the Motrin I took, so let’s cut that out of my diet completely, and hope that this Mystery Illness was a one-time thing that won’t plague me again.

That strategy worked–for about six months.

ER VISIT 4. When Kathleen and I retired this last winter, we had planned on taking a road trip up the coast and into Canada as soon as we could. I had some knee damage from an old injury that made driving longer than an hour or two painful, so I scheduled an arthroscopy to fix the internal damage.

I had the outpatient procedure in July, almost exactly one year after the onset of what I referred to as “the Motrin incident”. The work seemed to proceed without complications, and I was assured I’d be walking by the end of the week. That night, though, I went into shock–I suddenly felt extremely cold, and couldn’t stop shaking. Kathleen said it looked like a seizure. So, back to the ER we went!

There they found that my blood pressure was so low that they had to strap me to a bed upsidedown-ish, with my head lower than my feet. I had had extensive bleeding into my GI tract again. Well, so much for the swear-off-Motrin-and-hope-it-doesn’t-recur strategy of medical management. It was time to start the care and diagnostic cycle all over again, and this time, I wasn’t stopping until I knew exactly what was causing the Mystery Illness (and then fixing it)!

I had my trusty GP Dr. B—, a GI specialist, and a blood specialist all working the issue. We did all the standard and some not-so-standard tests and scans. Again. A pattern developed: see the doctor, suggest a test that might inform us, wait for the scheduled test appointment, wait a few days for the results, make a new appointment with the doctor, find out that test didn’t tell us anything useful, repeat.

Meantime, the bleeding had stopped, and my anemia, which had plummeted to about half of minimum “normal” blood count values, slowly started improving again. I was glad to start feeling better, but worried that the longer the investigation failed to find the cause of my illness, the more healed I would be, and the less likely that future digging would spot it.

Until the next incident, that is, which I was now reasonably confident would occur, sometime when my body was stressed. What frightened me was, what if the stress that triggers the bleed is something that has already put my body into a weakened state? Like a car accident, or emergency heart surgery?

I started to despair that, despite our best efforts, this incident might also end like the first, without knowing what caused it and so not being able to prevent it or keep me safe when it happened again. It was time to abandon my attachment to the laid back ways of country medicine, and go find some hot-shot city slicker doctor with some new ideas.

I found Dr G— at Johns Hopkins Depart­ment of Gastro­enterology and Hepa­tology, and presented all my symptoms, test results, specialist notes and speculations to her. You can picture my relief when she said, “Oh, it looks like you have   *   . I see that all the time. Let’s set you up with this specialized test to confirm, and if that’s it, we can fix it.”

This test is still several weeks away, and if her prediction is confirmed, there will be treatment procedures to undergo after that. But if the Illness isn’t banished yet, at least I have hope that the Mystery is. Maybe now I can think about something other than the next scanning or scoping (like planning that road trip!).

So that’s my story, at least to this point. Thank you, as always, for listening.

*(I intentionally didn’t say what the mystery illness was, as this story turned out not really to be about the illness, as much as about my experience of navigating it and the medical community here. If you’re really curious what Dr G— thinks I have, it’s the same thing the guy in this case study has.)

Thanks!
Dorn
9/10/2019