Medical Woes (NOT A HELP THREAD)
 

Before I get started, if you look for medical help in this thread you are officially an idiot. This is for bitching and relating, not advice (except in the form of go see a fucking doctor).

So. I was at work, teaching some dives. I go for a head-first surface dive, and get about 2m down when I realize I hadn't been equalizing the pressure in my ears. I do a forced equalization, and everything seems fine.

Hour and a half later my right ear is starting to bug me. I figured it was just residual soreness (happens), popped an advil, and tried to go to bed.

After 2 hours of waking up every 10 minutes with a different variation of my tympanic membrane shifting and causing very painful pain, I'm off to the ER at 0230. I get triaged, and two mildly interesting episodes of Law and Order I finally see a doc.

So it turns out my right ear canal looks like "a frog in a blender."

Well, fuck. That can't be good.

Apparently there's too much swelling to actually assess any damage I might have to my eardrum. All he could tell was "Blood, check. Swelling, check." Therefore I get a regimen of diarrhoea-guaranteeing antibiotics, Tylenol-3s (Fuck yes codeine), and an order to see my GP in a week.

So, slight problem; I don't have a GP. Thankfully the university has a clinic for students. Hopefully I can swing an extension to my Physics lab report, given the lack of sleep and drowsy-medication stuff.

So Blues, if I seem a bit testy over the next week or so, here's half the reason why.

But, enough about me, what about your medical woes? Feel free to bitch about any which thing, from doctors to nurses to medication to acute conditions to chronic conditions to etc. I do have one other request, though; please don't guilt-trip people. Thank you, and I would wish you good night, but I'm likely to be up for another 14 hours or so, so fuck off instead.

<3

Last April I was minding my own business when I suddenly got sick. Nothing big, a fever and a sore throat. I went to my GP and he gave me a Z Pack and everything was hunky dory for a week. Suddenly though I kept having the urge to go number 1 and my pee was dark yellow no matter how much water I drank, and boy I was constantly thirsty. I started feeling very weak and drowsy and lost my appetite entirely. After a day or so of this I went back to the doc, he said it was either mono or an allergic reaction and took a bucket of blood. The next day I took a Stats exam all the while having serious pee pains. Finally passover break came and I felt like warm shit. My fever came back and now my glands were swollen. My doc calls me up and says I need to come into the office NOW. He said my liver enzyme levels were through the roof and I was getting close to the liver failure level.

I rushed my ass over to him and he took another bucket of blood to test for mono, hepatitis and liver failure. I went back home and broke out into an itchy blotchy rash over 80% of my body and puked. I started to swell up too so my parents had enough and dragged me to the ER for a nice night of IV benadryl and a CT scan to which the results were, "well I dunno what this is." The next day after being in the ER until 3AM, I went for an ultrasound AND an MRI of my liver, all of which were inconclusive. It didn't look like anything was wrong but clearly I was having bad symptoms. Another bucket of blood taken from me and I was sent home again with nothing. After about 2.5 weeks total from beginning to end, my rash started to clear, no more puking, my appetite slowly returned (after losing 15 pounds) and I was feeling a lot better. All my lab results came back normal, and the fucking doctor was like "well we'll chalk this up to a liver virus." Thanks for doing nothing buddy.

Maybe you should have asked for the regular doctor instead?

I've said it before; Doctors don't know jack about the human body.

Christ Batgirl, I had a major case of sympathy pains from reading that, and now I'm breaking out in cold sweat...

My only gripe is that "mental disorders" aren't covered by insurance, but Obama said he wanted to change that, so here's hoping!

Oh, hey, God forbid that insurance companies cover people who actually NEED insurance.

-_- what a scam.

Here's a brain scratcher; I randomly have totally dehabilitating chest pains for like 30-sec to a minute. Is it gas or am I having heart attacks?

Neither, it's clearly voodoo.

It's not a medical woe as such, but my nose seems like it's blocked or semi-blocked throught out the year. It's pretty annoying.

And sometimes in the morning before waking up, I feel like my mind sort of wakes up before my body, so I know I'm lying on the bed but I can't really see anything clearly, my breathing is really slow and I can't move my limbs, but I do try to as well as I try to breath faster. It feels like I'm going to suffocate soon, but then after just a few seconds I wake up completely.

Haven't had any problems with the docor, so no stories. Sorry.

does this thread covers Dental?

If so... here'ya go.

I broke my front teeth when i was 13-14 years old. A Simple trip-&-fell. One of my front teeth went half-away, the other, was ok. So, after a few YEARS i get my teeth fixed. But there is a new problem, i have cavities. And it bleeds...

So, i check back with the dentist... root canal. Right behind my left incisive. 2 days of "BRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRMMMMMMMH HHHHHHHHH!" on my teeth later, all is fine.

Except, i lost so much of my teeth, that i need one of those metal little blocks inside of it (the original tooth is basicly a shell now. But the Doctor MISSED A PART. a piece BETWEEN 2 of my teeths (the one were i had root canal done, and the one behind it) had cavity, it spread... result? SECOND Root canal! Not AS bad, no metal block.

But here is the kicker... doc (new doc) messed up! She took so much of my teeth that some of it was too week... almost a year later, im minding my own business... i took a MENTOS, put it in my mouth, bite it... a part of the tooth broke free a whole chuck of the"outer shell" of my second root canal.

So here i am, outside of the occasional cavity, i take care of my teeth. But i have 2 root canals, 1 broken tooth and just might have to loose another (if the doc cant repair it)

I have bad teeth luck...

I've also had a bit of bad luck in regards to my teeth (or maybe good, depends how you think, I guess). I managed to evade braces in my teenage years only because I'd caught too many dodgeballs and volleyballs to the face in my even younger years. The crowns of my four front teeth (top and bottom) are loose, and my dentist was afraid that any undue force on them would just pull the buggers out. So, while I got to skip having metal bars across my teeth, I'm more or less stuck with the overlap I have on the bottom.

Also, I've got a bit of colon trouble for the past year, though it's only come to light that it's actually a colon issue in the past three months or so. Now I won't go into the details because there are just some things! :p But in any case, I get to have a camera shoved up my ass next Friday to see what's what. Yay for flexible sigmoidoscopies!

I would say it's more... they don't know close to jack. They know just enough to get the job. Then it's all white coats and holier-than-thou attitudes.

Do you drink soda right beforehand? One time on a really hot day I took a swig of pepsi and had a nasty chest pain like that, so it could be something like that. Or gas.

Hey that's not really fair. As someone who's father works in the emergency room(an RN) and having plenty of encounters with doctors while my brother was going through chemotherapy, most doctors certainly do know a lot about the human body (and if the tests my dad has to take are any example, are regularly tested to make sure they still know) It's just pretty impossible to know absolutely everything that could ever happen to the human body (and making a wrong diagnosis could make you very quickly dead so it's good they don't just jump to the quickest likely conclusion when they see something wrong)

Just throwing that out there. I'm not saying that every doctor ever is amazing and awesome, but it doesn't seem fair to lump them all into one category.


I've never really had any medical woes, but my brother having cancer was enough for our family, so it's all good. XD.

Really? My friend's insurance covers her medication for her depression medication.

Bugger. It's just glorified tech support. If they could say 'unplug yourself and plug yourself back in' they would, and they'd make just as much money.

Nah Doctors are good people mostly, I'm sure. And yes they know quite a bit but they are often only very slightly better at diagnosing and treating illness than the everyday shmoe with a medical almanac and some common sense.

Yea, I'm studying to be a doctor, so I intend on knowing as much as humanly possible. However, that's not to say that you don't have to crack open a medical textbook to diagnose something. My doctor had no clue what was up with me. I don't fault him for not knowing, just for not running all the tests at once and for really just leaving me hanging about information.

I believe this may hold the answers you seek.

I've gone through pretty bad bouts of it at times in my life. Mine were accompanied by the hallucinations, which can happen but is not a guarantee.

I have trouble sleeping, and no one knows why. I exercise regularly and eat pretty well and have been losing weight like a mo'fo, but I always wake up feeling tired and when I'm dreaming I'm conscious of the fact I'm asleep and can wake up at any time I feel like.

I get this every once in awhile. My eyes open up, and then I can't move anything. Can't even rotate my eyes, I'm just stuck laying there staring at whatever spot I happen to be focused on. Sometimes I hear the low chattering of voices and laughter.

Its a really horrible feeling, but it doesn't really seem to be anything serious, so I just don't worry about it.

@ Osterbaum, MasterofMagic:

You guys are suffering from sleep paralysis. Your body naturally paralyzes you while you sleep, or else your body would be acting it all out. This is dangerous for various reasons, because there would have been nothing stopping your caveman ancestor from chasing that potential mate of his dreams straight off a cliff in real life. For most people, the brain cuts it off as soon as you wake up, before you're even fully awake. For people who suffer from sleep paralysis, it sometimes takes minutes for the signal to go through. In that time, your body is paralyzed. Many people mistake it for alien abductions because it often is accompanied by the perception of garbled speech or other sounds, shadows or other images moving about, and/or the feeling of a negative presence or presences. One account I read about put a woman in the middle of a circle of cloaked figures performing a dark ritual of some sort. Overall, it can be a frightening and unpleasant experience.


Edit: Or if I weren't an idiot and had been more observant, Runswithnopants provided a link.

Actually, same problem as the last story you mentioned.

I would wake, but still be unable to move, and a circle of men in black robes would stand around the bed chanting "Meat. Meat. Meat." etc. etc.

Myriad of mostly minor health issues aside from that of the "It'll hurt like hell but you're not in any danger" persuasion.

Oh yeah, I mean, it's totally not their fault (except when it is), it's just frustrating when you have purple rash that looks like Mother Teresa and you wanna go to an authority on treating human ailments and say 'hey, what the hell is up with Mother Teresa on my thigh?!' but the best they have is ointment that 'might' work. I'm exaggerating, but there it is.

To those interested:

If indeed I do have sleep paralysis (or isolated sleep paralysis) then I don't get the hallucinations. I'm just concentrated on waking up. And I'd like to point out that while I am aware of where I am more or less, I don't really see the room all that clearly.

Just to cover this, but I get the occasional pang of a similar nature. Heart attacks include chest pain and often pain down the left arm in men, while women tend to get it more often in the jaw, although either area or neither aren't unheard of in both sexes.

On the other hand, heart attacks have other key indicators, such as shortness of breath, and in the absence of at least that, what I'd chalk it up to is what I sometimes get, which is a spasm of one or more of the intercostal muscles. Basically, they all have to work together to help the ribcage move when you breathe, so if you have one decide it doesn't want to play nicely, it can be quite painful, but it's in no way permanently damaging.

Sup colonoscopy buddy! Evacuating your digestive system is without a doubt the worst part of it, have fun.

Ah...colonoscopies...there's a history of cancer on both sides of the family...so, yeah...in 20 years, I get to have the pleasure of having one every year or so. Yeah...not looking forward to that.

Assuming it doesn't happen sooner, of course. A few years back I managed to get a infection in my dietary tract twice within a six month period. An all together unpleasant experience in-and-of itself (not being able to stomach anything for two weeks sucks), my doctor said if it happened again within a relatively short period, they'd have to scope me to see if there was something wrong.

Thankfully...I didn't have to go do that.

So I've heard. I'm both excited and terrified of it at the same time. It's so new and yet so... well, not something you'd do on a Thursday evening. Plus come the day of the procedure there's the whole "there's a 1 in 10,000 risk of perforating the colon, which could lead to infection and then we'll have to do a colostomy." So I have two very special requests for the doctor come next Friday: For him to please, please be gentle (it's my first time :p) and to make sure that camera is more slippery than a buttered eel.

I think it still fits; I don't always hear/see things, sometimes I just lay there and stare. And the vision thing is probably just one of those mild differences between instances of the same thing.