Sunday, January 29, 2012
Small Town Medicine
As I've gotten older, I've (perhaps understandably) found myself spending more time talking and thinking about my health. I find this trend disturbing, because it puts me within earshot of being that crotchity old lady loudly complaining about bunions and colitis while standing in the buffet line at the casino.
It sucks having a chronic illness. It sucks even worse having one that the average person has learned everything they know about it from ads for prescription drugs on television. And it sucks even worse having one nobody's ever heard of and whose name gives no clue to the nature of what it really is. That's why I was actually happy when I heard that Venus Williams was diagnosed with Sjögren's Syndrome. Shit, people can't even SAY it. The gist of Sjögren's is essentially: overwhelming exhaustion, joint pain, dry mouth, eyes, skin, etc. It's an autoimmune disease, with no cure, and no treatment. Every website I've gone to for support has such helpful suggestions as: carry water for your dry mouth, keep saline drops for your eyes, and chapstick for your lips. Duh--I did that shit long before I even know what I had. And Sjögren's is usually accompanied by other conditions, like RA, Lupus or Fibromyalgia. So yeah, the Fibro dx wasn't much of a surprise, either. But getting diagnosed with this shit is infuriatingly nebulous--there is no test that gives you any certaintly. You just fit certain symptom clusters or you don't. And the symptoms are common enough that years later, it's perfectly possible to suddenly discover you've got something compeltely different--even something that could have been treated over those years and your life has been spent in pain and misery by virtue only of a doctor not putting enough 2 and 2's together.
At Christmas, I learned that my mom and several of her family members all have idiopatic neuropathy in their legs. Given the fact that my feet still constantly hurt me, but the worst of my Fibro symptoms are usually under control, I figured I'd talk to my doctor about it. My rheumatoligist is a Greek immigrant couple in their late 70's. They are quite charming, most of the time, but I keep waiting for the day that I'm told they're retiring and selling the practice to someone new. Their age causes me to wonder with caution exactly how up-to-date their advice really is, but so far, on matters relating to their specialty, they seem to know what they're talking about. Move away from rheumatology, though, and you're suddenly sitting in the exam room with your Grandmother spouting off old wives' tales. Last summer's visit shortly after I had a miscarriage resulted in some doozies about how and why a blighted ovum might happen. Luckily I was still too disappointed in the whole situation to really listen to anybody's opinion about it. I just let her rattle on and waited for her to leave. And so it was this last time with Mr. Dr. K: I'd explained the newly discovered family history, and the pain in my feet. My mother doesn't have Type 2 diabetes, but her father did, and her brother does. He tested my feet by poking them with the bent-up end of a paper clip, and then said that if it were neuropathy, the pain wouldn't come and go as I've described, so he didn't think that was an issue. Then he began lecturing me about losing weight to prevent T2 diabetes. Losing a little weight, he said, was bound to help me whether I had T2 or not. But not to worry, we all put on weight as we age. "You see," he explained, "Young children don't overeat like adults do." I probably didn't mask my "WTF?" face as much as I ought to have, so he continued: "Children, their stomach muscles are much more fit and strong. And as we age, the muscles loosen up and it becomes much easier to overeat."
So yeah, I won't be taking any diet advice from Dr. K.
It sucks having a chronic illness. It sucks even worse having one that the average person has learned everything they know about it from ads for prescription drugs on television. And it sucks even worse having one nobody's ever heard of and whose name gives no clue to the nature of what it really is. That's why I was actually happy when I heard that Venus Williams was diagnosed with Sjögren's Syndrome. Shit, people can't even SAY it. The gist of Sjögren's is essentially: overwhelming exhaustion, joint pain, dry mouth, eyes, skin, etc. It's an autoimmune disease, with no cure, and no treatment. Every website I've gone to for support has such helpful suggestions as: carry water for your dry mouth, keep saline drops for your eyes, and chapstick for your lips. Duh--I did that shit long before I even know what I had. And Sjögren's is usually accompanied by other conditions, like RA, Lupus or Fibromyalgia. So yeah, the Fibro dx wasn't much of a surprise, either. But getting diagnosed with this shit is infuriatingly nebulous--there is no test that gives you any certaintly. You just fit certain symptom clusters or you don't. And the symptoms are common enough that years later, it's perfectly possible to suddenly discover you've got something compeltely different--even something that could have been treated over those years and your life has been spent in pain and misery by virtue only of a doctor not putting enough 2 and 2's together.
At Christmas, I learned that my mom and several of her family members all have idiopatic neuropathy in their legs. Given the fact that my feet still constantly hurt me, but the worst of my Fibro symptoms are usually under control, I figured I'd talk to my doctor about it. My rheumatoligist is a Greek immigrant couple in their late 70's. They are quite charming, most of the time, but I keep waiting for the day that I'm told they're retiring and selling the practice to someone new. Their age causes me to wonder with caution exactly how up-to-date their advice really is, but so far, on matters relating to their specialty, they seem to know what they're talking about. Move away from rheumatology, though, and you're suddenly sitting in the exam room with your Grandmother spouting off old wives' tales. Last summer's visit shortly after I had a miscarriage resulted in some doozies about how and why a blighted ovum might happen. Luckily I was still too disappointed in the whole situation to really listen to anybody's opinion about it. I just let her rattle on and waited for her to leave. And so it was this last time with Mr. Dr. K: I'd explained the newly discovered family history, and the pain in my feet. My mother doesn't have Type 2 diabetes, but her father did, and her brother does. He tested my feet by poking them with the bent-up end of a paper clip, and then said that if it were neuropathy, the pain wouldn't come and go as I've described, so he didn't think that was an issue. Then he began lecturing me about losing weight to prevent T2 diabetes. Losing a little weight, he said, was bound to help me whether I had T2 or not. But not to worry, we all put on weight as we age. "You see," he explained, "Young children don't overeat like adults do." I probably didn't mask my "WTF?" face as much as I ought to have, so he continued: "Children, their stomach muscles are much more fit and strong. And as we age, the muscles loosen up and it becomes much easier to overeat."
So yeah, I won't be taking any diet advice from Dr. K.
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