Health update [me, health]
Oct. 20th, 2026 05:31 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
siderea[Reminder: don't be talking about your health online except under a pseudonym.]
I've been going through a lot with my health recently. Sort of. It's a bit weird and hard to talk about because it's not exactly that I've been in ill health. At least probably not. The waveform has yet to collapse.
I suppose it is fair to say part of what is going on – a substantial part – is about the interaction of being a disabled person and getting medical care: the way I am disabled makes it hard and extra time consuming to go places to meet people, like say going to medical facilities to meet wih medical professionals.
It can also cause exacerbations of my disability. This means a not-huge amount of medical appointments actually works out to be a huge amount of medical appointments for me because it often has a huge impact – sometimes including medically – on me. For instance, it recently took me a week to recover from the consequences of a recent medical exam, where by "exam" I mean "sitting in a chair waiting for the exam to start", and by "consequences" I mean "increased pain the following day, which then fucked up my sleep, which slowed my recovery from the aggravation of my pain, which protracted the disruption of my sleep from pain, lather, rinse, repeat; and also left me exhausted from all the sleep I was missing."
This interacts poorly with the apparent fact that it does not seem possible for me to have any contact with the medical establishment without a medical professional finding a lump or other potential sign of cancer. It has never turned out to be cancer. It just seems that I am... lumpier... than normal. But it means that when I present for medical problem X, not only do I wind up having all the subsequent medical appointments for X, I will also wind up having all the subsequent medical appointments for problem Y, which is Oh Look A Lump Maybe This Is Cancer.
When I got the CT scan of my aorta, they happened to get a look at my thyroid, and, because this was at the same hospital I presented to for the neck infection of 2022, they had a comparator. The radiologist reported that since 2022 the small lump they found on my thyroid then is less small now. So I've been dealing with the follow-up of that (doctor, labs, ultrasound, labs, more doctor).
This raises the obvious question of whether I have noticed any symptoms of thyroid malfunction, for which the answer is: sure, a little – but for decades. Doctors have been running thyroid panels on me forever, and they all come back fine. None of those symptoms have become much worse in the last three years, and one of them has gotten a bit better. The labs are finally showing something a tad off, but not actually that unusual for someone my age.
Then in July, I got a symptom that has nothing to do with my thyroid. It's one of those minor symptoms that they tell people with uteruses who have been through menopause means It's probably nothing. But... call your doctor. Unfortunately, my uterus was already being eyed with suspicion of trying to go rogue with cancer because lumps had already been found there (when my hip was imaged in 2022). I waited hopefully for a week or so for the symptom to go away on its own, and it didn't, so I called my new gynecologist (who is awesome). They weren't able to get me in to see her until mid-September which is just as well because of all the thyroid-related care I needed to show up for. Over the last few weeks the gynecologist (and the lab) ruled out a bunch of less serious problems. I have a ultrasound and a biopsy scheduled for November. This was convenient in that it gave both Mr Bostoniensis and I time to get all our seasonal vaccinations done, which will be useful given how much time it seems I'm going to be spending in medical facilities.
Also, there was a biannual teeth cleaning and a mammogram somewhere in all this.
So that's where things are. I've been dealing with an large amount of medical care which isn't to treat any of the things that have actually been problems for me, but to assess whether I have a problem I don't yet know about. It may all of it be nothing. It is to be hoped that it is nothing. But it has been so far and looks like it is going to continue to be a tiring, stressful, logistically-challenging, and physically painful nothing that hits the out-of-pocket-max on my health insurance.
It's awkward to try to talk about. I have multiple doctors concerned I might have cancer so I am going through tediously much medical care which is all about cancer. But I almost certainly don't have cancer. Just not absolutely certainly. The odds are very low that I do. I probably don't. "Ugh my schedule is all fucked up because of all the medical appointments for cancer my doctors think there is a very small chance I have."
The problem is that the odds just went from one in a hundred to one in twenty. And as we all know, that's a 1 on a 1d20. So this is basically a reasonably easy, but not sure-fire, saving throw.
So: I'm dealing with all doctors all the time, only not really, it's just that it takes very little doctor-visiting to cast a long shadow on my schedule including by causing medical complications of my pre-existing disabling conditions; and none of that medical care is to treat any of those pre-existing disabling conditions; it's not, in fact, to treat any condition at all at this point, since it's all diagnostic (e.g. imaging) or prophylactic (e.g. vaccines); it's to identify whether or not I have a medical condition that, while very bad to have, I am very unlikely to have.
(And no, nobody has done anything futher to investigate the cause of my chest pain back in June. Everybody is too preoccupied by the Oh Look A Lump Maybe It's Cancer question.)
This week, I have a telehealth appointment with my PCP to follow up on whether he thinks I need to do something about the thyroid lump and I have a scheduled flu shot at a pharmacy. In the next month (Nov), I have an ultrasound and a biopsy, the latter of which will be done in an operating room with an anaesthesiologist.
It feels slightly absurd and dramatic, but cancer is bad, so I guess this all makes sense.
I've been going through a lot with my health recently. Sort of. It's a bit weird and hard to talk about because it's not exactly that I've been in ill health. At least probably not. The waveform has yet to collapse.
I suppose it is fair to say part of what is going on – a substantial part – is about the interaction of being a disabled person and getting medical care: the way I am disabled makes it hard and extra time consuming to go places to meet people, like say going to medical facilities to meet wih medical professionals.
It can also cause exacerbations of my disability. This means a not-huge amount of medical appointments actually works out to be a huge amount of medical appointments for me because it often has a huge impact – sometimes including medically – on me. For instance, it recently took me a week to recover from the consequences of a recent medical exam, where by "exam" I mean "sitting in a chair waiting for the exam to start", and by "consequences" I mean "increased pain the following day, which then fucked up my sleep, which slowed my recovery from the aggravation of my pain, which protracted the disruption of my sleep from pain, lather, rinse, repeat; and also left me exhausted from all the sleep I was missing."
This interacts poorly with the apparent fact that it does not seem possible for me to have any contact with the medical establishment without a medical professional finding a lump or other potential sign of cancer. It has never turned out to be cancer. It just seems that I am... lumpier... than normal. But it means that when I present for medical problem X, not only do I wind up having all the subsequent medical appointments for X, I will also wind up having all the subsequent medical appointments for problem Y, which is Oh Look A Lump Maybe This Is Cancer.
When I got the CT scan of my aorta, they happened to get a look at my thyroid, and, because this was at the same hospital I presented to for the neck infection of 2022, they had a comparator. The radiologist reported that since 2022 the small lump they found on my thyroid then is less small now. So I've been dealing with the follow-up of that (doctor, labs, ultrasound, labs, more doctor).
This raises the obvious question of whether I have noticed any symptoms of thyroid malfunction, for which the answer is: sure, a little – but for decades. Doctors have been running thyroid panels on me forever, and they all come back fine. None of those symptoms have become much worse in the last three years, and one of them has gotten a bit better. The labs are finally showing something a tad off, but not actually that unusual for someone my age.
Then in July, I got a symptom that has nothing to do with my thyroid. It's one of those minor symptoms that they tell people with uteruses who have been through menopause means It's probably nothing. But... call your doctor. Unfortunately, my uterus was already being eyed with suspicion of trying to go rogue with cancer because lumps had already been found there (when my hip was imaged in 2022). I waited hopefully for a week or so for the symptom to go away on its own, and it didn't, so I called my new gynecologist (who is awesome). They weren't able to get me in to see her until mid-September which is just as well because of all the thyroid-related care I needed to show up for. Over the last few weeks the gynecologist (and the lab) ruled out a bunch of less serious problems. I have a ultrasound and a biopsy scheduled for November. This was convenient in that it gave both Mr Bostoniensis and I time to get all our seasonal vaccinations done, which will be useful given how much time it seems I'm going to be spending in medical facilities.
Also, there was a biannual teeth cleaning and a mammogram somewhere in all this.
So that's where things are. I've been dealing with an large amount of medical care which isn't to treat any of the things that have actually been problems for me, but to assess whether I have a problem I don't yet know about. It may all of it be nothing. It is to be hoped that it is nothing. But it has been so far and looks like it is going to continue to be a tiring, stressful, logistically-challenging, and physically painful nothing that hits the out-of-pocket-max on my health insurance.
It's awkward to try to talk about. I have multiple doctors concerned I might have cancer so I am going through tediously much medical care which is all about cancer. But I almost certainly don't have cancer. Just not absolutely certainly. The odds are very low that I do. I probably don't. "Ugh my schedule is all fucked up because of all the medical appointments for cancer my doctors think there is a very small chance I have."
The problem is that the odds just went from one in a hundred to one in twenty. And as we all know, that's a 1 on a 1d20. So this is basically a reasonably easy, but not sure-fire, saving throw.
So: I'm dealing with all doctors all the time, only not really, it's just that it takes very little doctor-visiting to cast a long shadow on my schedule including by causing medical complications of my pre-existing disabling conditions; and none of that medical care is to treat any of those pre-existing disabling conditions; it's not, in fact, to treat any condition at all at this point, since it's all diagnostic (e.g. imaging) or prophylactic (e.g. vaccines); it's to identify whether or not I have a medical condition that, while very bad to have, I am very unlikely to have.
(And no, nobody has done anything futher to investigate the cause of my chest pain back in June. Everybody is too preoccupied by the Oh Look A Lump Maybe It's Cancer question.)
This week, I have a telehealth appointment with my PCP to follow up on whether he thinks I need to do something about the thyroid lump and I have a scheduled flu shot at a pharmacy. In the next month (Nov), I have an ultrasound and a biopsy, the latter of which will be done in an operating room with an anaesthesiologist.
It feels slightly absurd and dramatic, but cancer is bad, so I guess this all makes sense.
