Medical Adventures

I’m back home again, but don’t expect heavy posting. At this point I’m not even picking any fights with my cat, and she only weighs eight pounds. I’ve lost thirty pounds; not all bad, but this is probably not the best way to do it.

After a week of fever and chills I went to see my primary care physician. She sent me to the ER, where they diagnosed me with pneumonia and sent me home with an antibiotic. After another week I was starting to get worse instead of better so I called her office and she said no, don’t come here, go to the ER. They said it not only was worse, it was quite a bit worse, and clapped me in the hospital with IV’s in both arms.

The doctors there threw a lot of medical terms at me, few of which I understood and even fewer of which I cared about. Doctors love to label things. They don’t cure things, they just label them, as if that somehow solves the problem. At one point they said I had “necrotizing pneumonia,” which is supposedly scary because the first part of the name has to do with death. I don’t scare easily, because if I was easy to kill I would have been dead long ago. I’m going to be around pissing people off for a long time yet.

Then the pulmanologist showed up and told everyone to calm down and that someone should be reading the x-rays who knew how to read x-rays. He and I have a long history. He said the pneumonia is not “necrotizing” anything and that they were just seeing a lot of scar tissue and cysts that have been in my lung for years. My lungs have been down many miles of very bad road. As I said, I have empirical evidence that I am not easy to kill.

So after a week he went ahead and discharged me with a discharge summary of “unresolved pneumonia.” (He likes labels too.) Basically that means that after all of that adventure I’m back to where I was two weeks ago; at home on antibiotics and with pneumonia to about the same degree that I had when initially diagnosed. It would be unfair to say that all of the fun and games were wasted effort, because it did get worse and they brought it back down to its original state.

And, by the way, hospital food is still not fit for human consumption. One doesn't, of course, go to the hospital for the dining experience but, damn.