DON'T listen to your body!

As is so often the case, this post is something I adapted from my personal journal, which I will admit often amounts to a load of complaining. But keeping a journal is one of the sure symptoms of writerhood. I have had many a person sit down with me over the years saying "I want to be a writer", meaning they want to make effortless money and be an instant best-seller (it can't be that hard, can it?). One of the first things I ask them is, "Do you keep a journal?" Normally I get a blank look, a why-would-I-want-to-do-that expression, as if a journal must be written on pink Hello Kitty stationery with scented lavender ink.

Mostly people merely take stabs at writing, brief ones. Then they sort of run in terror, realizing that they will actually have to put their work "out there". As a friend recently told me about her own former ambition to write, it just got buried under the mundane tasks we all must undertake in the course of a day.

All this leads to something else. (Which is what I seem to do in this blog, though I can't tell you why. Steinbeck leads to Travels with Charley leads to why people treat dogs like babies.) So this is about my never-ending, awful sort-of-relationship with doctors, who have been poking and prodding my sagging old body for a year now trying to figure out why I am having this persistent, nagging, sometimes severely disabling pain.

It's getting in the way of jumping in to preparing my novel The Glass Character for publication (which I wish I could enjoy more). This is what I wrote this morning:

"I want to get the medical stuff over with, which it should be next week when I get told there’s nothing wrong with me again. I have a theory it’s a low-grade infection, but I doubt if he will give me anything for it, will likely say “it’ll go away on its own” when I have been in pain for nearly a year now. They said the same thing about the infuriating ear symptoms which I’ve now had for 13 months. Things do NOT “go away on their own” in many cases, but doctors now let things fester for so long they become ingrained and chronic and really WON’T go away. We then have a "nuisance patient", a hypochondriac completely obsessed with imaginary illness. But someone has commanded doctors from “on high” not to prescribe antibiotics. They’ve swung from one ridiculous extreme to the other, and in both cases it’s to get you out of the office FAST."

So how many specialists or procedures HAVE I been exposed to? Let me count the ways. Gastroenterologist (God, these things are hard to spell). Gynecologist. Ultrasound. Colonoscopy. Ultrasound again, because they couldn't find anything the first time, and now urologist/cystoscopy (can’t ever remember how to spell that one). I have also been to a nephrologists and an otolaryng-whatever-it-is. All uselessly. Each person takes a part of the body, and they are never co-ordinated or put together in any way. They’re not supposed to be. Each body part must get sick in its own way, and if it gets sick outside of certain strict boundaries, then you’re not sick, or at least that part of you isn’t. If you have a condition such as a bladder infection and only have three symptoms out of five, then you don’t have a bladder infection and will not be given antibiotics.

Oh, antibiotics! Like Valium in the '70s, doctors handed them out like candy until relatively recently. Patients wanted something to relieve their fear and distress about being sick. They wanted to come away with something. Doctors wanted them the fuck out of their office so they could go on to the next patient. So they went home with a prescription.

Then all of a sudden, we are being told WE were wrong to accept all those prescriptions for all these years. WE were wrong to seek a fast and easy way out of disabling symptoms. We should have just put up or shut up, because there was probably nothing wrong with us anyway.

Suddenly, in spite of everything our doctors had been telling us for decades, antibiotics were just wrong.

It still comes at us from every side, ads on TV with cute but shaming slogans like, "Not all bugs need drugs." It's a kind of finger-shaking admonishment to the public, because for God's sake didn't we create this situation to begin with? The public, being weak and self-indulgent, demanded antibiotics so vociferously that they created a race of Superbugs which are now resistant to medication.

We have rendered antibiotics almost completely ineffective. How does that make us feel?

Doctors had to stop acting like free vending machines for this seductive candy because "someone" ordered them to, some medical association or other. "It will go away on its own" became the new mantra. This got patients out of the office nearly as fast as "Here, take this prescription for amoxycillin".

Now, you can have pus running out of you and feverish red inflammation and strep throat (and my granddaughter, then three years old and running a fever of 104, might have died from it: my daughter, a dragon when she needs to be, INSISTED she be prescribed antibiotics, which cleared it up completely in two days), and the doctor will not prescribe antibiotics. Once again, the crushing weight of shame is applied to us as she tells us something we have already been told 100 times. "Patients ruined antibiotics by taking them too often. It will go away on its own."

There are two things my doctor never prescribes: antibiotics and pain relievers. When I told her I'd had significant and even severe pain for a year, pain that sometimes prevented me from functioning well, she said, "Advil is the drug of choice."

"But I've been taking Advil for a year now and it has no effect at all."

"Try Tylenol."

"I've tried them all. None of them work."

"Advil," she said, a little testily.

"Can't I have anything stronger?"

Oh, it's the facial expressions, the bodily shifting, the "I know I'm dealing with an addict cadging drugs" manner that gives it all away.

"Advil is the drug of choice." (Meaning: if Advil doesn't work, I am having the wrong kind of pain and need to set it straight. Or else I'm lying.)

Another time she asked me the doseage I was taking and I said something like 800 milligrams. "That's too much," she said. "But the lower dose doesn't do anything." "Always take the correct doseage or you'll damage your kidneys." But the "correct doseage" wasn't doing any more than the so-called overdose anyway.

I have enjoyed good health for most of my life and have stayed away from doctors whenever possible, so I can hardly be called a hypochondriac unless such a damning stereotype can develop in a  few months. I hate taking pills, and it does not occur to me to abuse prescriptions. I have dreaded developing some sort of vague but persistent, painful medical condition that no one can get to the root of. And now it's here. My own theory - and who gives a shit what I think anyway, it's only my body - is that this is a low-grade bladder infection which has been flying under the radar for a year. But doctors refuse to see it that way. "Your urine test is normal," my doctor said, furrowing her brow and sitting back in that "get out of here and go directly to the psych ward" way. If my urine test is normal, I cannot have a bladder infection and have to go home and behave myself.

Over and over again I hear/read the same advice from people: Listen to your body! If anything feels amiss, go see your doctor immediately! I am here to tell you that you won't be in her office for long. Your symptoms will have to escalate until you are in severe enough pain to wait months to see a specialist, who will tell you there's nothing wrong anyway. The cancer diagnosis won't come until it is far too late to treat it. Then you will be asked, "For God's sake, why didn't you DO something about it?"

Is there nothing you can do? Why are you stupid enough to ask? Take Advil, which should get rid of all your symptoms. It's the drug of choice.

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.ca/2013/04/the-glass-character-synopsis.html

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm

Sick

I am one of those people who never gets sick. Almost.

Or should I say: I am almost never one of those people, or I am one of those people who almost, or – never, or -

I don’t know what happened on March 12. It felt like a cold. Just a nuisancy thing, a premature summer cold (like the viral bout of what-I-was-sure-was-flu last July). One of those gummy-throated, slightly raw, uneasily sneezy – but you already know what I mean.

I don’t know when it pounced. Maybe the next day. Suddenly a lightning bolt slashed across my chest, my throat became so raw I couldn’t swallow, my eyes were sealed nearly shut, I shivered, I sweated, I ached, I couldn’t breathe, and I came to the conclusion that I had one of those nice little summer colds I had last July.

How do I know? My doctor told me so.

It doesn’t matter what you “have” now. Your doctor listens to your back (never your chest), then, even if it’s pleurisy or pneumonia or bubonic plague, says “It’ll just have to go away on its own.”

This thing has been “going away on its own” for ten days now. I won’t get into the digestive problems. Oh yes I will. I have abdominal cramps, gas, diarrhea and it takes days to digest anything. (I am totting up all these “symptoms” just as I think of them.) Last night, trying to sleep while listening to a rhythmic bubbling, creaking groan in my chest, a sudden freshet of blood shot all over my pillowcase, presumably a nosebleed, the first one I have ever had in my life.

Nice little summer cold.

I have had the aches and the shakes. Bizarre gushing sweats alternate with freezing shivers. And twitches, very strange ones, quite violent, almost like little seizures. I get six or seven of them, one right after the other. Why? I couldn’t eat and couldn’t throw up and suffered one of those migraines that should have its own postal code.

It was the usual thing, where it would seem to get a little bit better. One day I went for a drive, came home, lay down for a moment, and lifted my head 90 minutes later, my face stuck to the pillow with God knows what.

I don’t know what got me onto the cough syrup, because I hate the stuff. Maybe it was the groany deep quivering vibrations in my chest that seemed almost like whales talking. Maybe it was coughing up all that unspeakable “stuff”. I took a shot of it once, I swear, just to put myself under. It didn’t work, because cough syrup has all sorts of stuff in it that causes a frightening rebound effect. You lie there in the dark with jangling alarm-bells going off in your head, sure you will never feel any better. Ever.

Funny sounds began to issue from my body. The first funny sound seemed to be coming from my larynx, which was as swollen as a golf ball and almost wouldn’t let me swallow. When I tried to sleep, I heard a noise like an old rope being sawed back and forth on one of those ships, you know, like on Popeye. Then, to my horror, I heard a little “hoo, hoo!” sound, as if something were alive and swimming around in there. It was the first time my larynx has ever talked back to me.

It’s a choir, of sorts, a chorus of mucus and phlegm and other disgusting fluids no one would want. My sinuses crackle and make a sound like a balloon being squeezed. When I sit up in the morning, a huge windy wheeze gusts up out of my windpipe, sounding like an old pedal organ or air brakes on a bus. It scares the shit out of me.

“You HAVE to go to the doctor,” my husband says. “What did the doctor say?” my friend asks me. She must come from the school who still believes “going to the doctor” actually has a point. I have come to believe that doctors do absolutely dick-all these days except listen to your back and push the little button on the machine that says, “It’ll just have to go away on its own.”

I know that for a long time, doctors prescribed too many antibiotics. These same doctors would have us believe that this was all the fault of the patients, because they refused to leave the office without that little piece of paper.  After moaning and groaning and begging and pleading, they went home gaily waving a prescription, feeling oh-so-much-better-already. And eventually, when these drugs stopped working from overprescribing, GUESS WHOSE FAULT IT WAS?

The doctor’s? Don’t be ridiculous! Doctors are fountainheads of Wisdom and Truth. They would NEVER prescribe anything unless the patient absolutely needed it, or else got them down in a choke-hold on the floor and refused to release them until they had that little piece of paper.

The patients, self-indulgent, weak and soft in the head, DEMANDED these prescriptions. It had absolutely nothing to do with the fact that doctors wanted to process patients in and out of the office at light speed, and the best way to do that – the best way to get rid of them fast – was to hand them that little piece of paper.

NEXT!

As with most things, the situation has swung wildly from one stupid extreme to the other. From handing EVERYONE a prescription for banana-flavored Amoxicillin or whatever it's called just to get them out that revolving door as fast as possible, doctors now Do Not Prescribe Antibiotics. EVER. For anything. Antibiotics no longer work, you see. The reason they no longer work is that YOU asked for them all the time, you self-indulgent little whiner! You spoiled it for everyone, so now we can't prescribe them at all, or we'll Look Bad. Some big doctor, some high-up doctor, some Great Agency in the Sky that tells doctors what to do, has now told doctors Not To Prescribe Antibiotics.

EVER.

Which is why I will clearly die, rather than disgrace myself by crawling in to the doctor's office and asking please, please, PLEASE may I have some of that banana-flavored goo with the capacity to save my life.  It's been a privilege whining to you.

Why not blow your brains out?

Public Health Care Option 

Crackling in Ear

November 13, 2011  Posted by Julian

Blogger's note: Since coming down with the Virus from Hell in San Francisco - where I left my heart, my wallet and my health - I've had a residual effect that's driving me crazy. I get a crackle in my left ear - actually, it's more like cannon-fire - whenever I swallow. I realize this is probably due to a bit of infection lingering in the eustachian tube and won't clear up except with antibiotics. But last time I tried to get antibiotics out of my doctor I had to get down on my belly and grovel. She simply does not dispense them any more.

Ever.

It doesn't matter how sick you are. She won't give them to you. From handing them out like candy, a way to quickly dispatch nuisance patients and cycle them out of the office without listening to them, the pendulum has swung violently the other way. Doctors have been "told" (by whom? The Big Brother of Doctorhood?) not to do it any more because, as the snappy little TV jingle puts it, "not all bugs need drugs".

But I know why this happened, and it's ALL OUR FAULT. People came in sick, and because they wanted to feel better (and because doctors had been telling them to do this so they'd feel better), they'd ask for antibiotics. So because of  all that overprescribing, which is our fault, NOT the doctors', over time the drugs lost their potency (though that's probably due to all the antibiotics pumped into fish, chicken and carrots to make them grow faster and bigger and to have a shelf life of approximately 100 years).  So all of a sudden it's NOT cool to prescribe antibiotics, meaning doctors have had to find a whole new way of getting rid of patients fast.

They do this by shaming them for even thinking of asking for antibiotics, no matter how sick they are.

One of the more disgusting features of this bug was an eye infection. Pus was running out of my deeply-bloodshot eyes, which were stuck together when I woke up in the morning and had to be pried apart.

"They look fine to me," she said.

I begged; I pleaded. I could not see. Things swam before my eyes, which felt like they were on fire. Finally, with a purse-mouthed look that seemed to say, "well, OK, if you want to be a total hypochondriac about it", she dispensed a tiny bottle of drops that cleared it all up in two days.

But the ear problem, it goes on, along with a raw patch in my throat that migrates around like a storm system. At the height of this illness, which my doctor describes as a "summer cold", it was lodged in my larynx and I could barely swallow or eat.

Too bad it didn't last long enough for serious weight loss.

Anyway, looking up the billion or so foolproof home remedies on the internet, I found lots of wonderful things such as drinking apple cider vinegar and painting iodine on the inside of your wrist. It seems anyone and everyone can assume the demeanor and expertise of a doctor on the net. When I got reading this one, I had a "huh?" reaction followed by a "Jesus God" one.

This essay, which turns out to be written by some guy named Julian, is posted on a site called Publc Health Care Option. Sounds good, eh? Sounds reputable. So why not just get a Q-tip and start rooting away inside your infected ear? Never mind that any doctor worth his or her salt would say you should NEVER try to clear up an ear infection with a Q-tip or anything else that is smaller than a baseball bat. It pushes wax and debris deeper into the eustachian tube and may even rupture the eardrum.

But hey, this Julian guy. . . I like his confidence, not to mention the fact that he doesn't tell us to pour iodine in our ears or wave a dead cat over our head at midnight. Instead, he gives us the Valsava Maneuver, which apparently is at least three different things, none of which make any sense. 

I honestly don't know what language this was in originally, as obviously it's one of those automated internet "translations" that completely destroys meaning and syntax. Or maybe it's in English after all, which makes it even worse. In any case, it sure is repetitive, as if Julian is trying to pound his medical points home.

WARNING: DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME! But do read it as sheer entertainment, and as a cautionary tale about trying internet home remedies. I'm thinking of making one up myself, a warm horseshit compress maybe, to see how many people respond with, "Hey, this really works!"


(Please note. I have encountered English even more badly-fractured than this in medical doctors who were foreign-trained, not that it makes any difference now that  medical schools require a course in Indifference 101.)

Listening to a consistent crackling sound in the ear might be a trigger for concern. A lot of of us usually disregard modest afflictions like ear challenges in the hope they will just go away, or because they are not debilitating enough to disrupt a everyday regimen. Nonetheless, it can be constantly superior to handle a symptom rather then a affliction, and arrest it in advance of it gives rise to supplemental problems.

 

Crackling in Ear – Leads to Listed beneath are some triggers that could bring about a crackling sound inside your ears. Ear wax This is certainly amongst one of the most common brings about for listening to a crackling sound in your ear, and quite possibly the easiest to solution. Use an ear wash from the neighborhood drugstore to get rid of the excess ear wax and unclog ears.

You could possibly even use a Q-tip to remove any wax buildup within your ear. The ideal time for you to use a Q-tip is immediately after a sizzling bath, if the warmth and steam have had a softening effect within the ear wax. Keep in mind to get very watchful when inserting a Q-tip into your ear, taking care not to push also deep as this could induce severe damage like a ruptured ear drum.

Congestion/Sinusitis You could possibly experience crackling sounds inside your ears if you have inflamed sinuses or chest congestion. These signs often display up together along with the quickest approach to get relief is always to use decongestants. Often, it’s possible you’ll hear a crackling sound in your ears when swallowing, which can be the consequence of fluid create up as part of your ears. Untreated, this may lead to ear infections.

Steam inhalation might also offer some reduction, and is also advisable for folks who may have weak chests or simply a tendency to endure from congestion. To the right way inhale steam, use hot, although not boiling water.

Valsalva Maneuver


Area the bowlful of drinking water on a secure floor, cover your head having a towel and inhale through your nose. In case your nose is blocked, you might come across it less difficult to inhale by your mouth. Once you will get some relief from congestion, you might discover that the crackling in your ears when chewing or swallowing has ceased. Eustachian Tube Dysfunction (ETD) It is a ailment wherever blockages build while in the eustachian tube. The eustachian tube is actually a thin tube which connects the center ear to the throat. For clarity, have a search at a human ear diagram.


Construct up of fluid while in the ear can cause Eustachian Tube Dysfunction, among the indicators of which can be hearing a crackling within the ear with loud noises. ETD could also come about as an extra situation if you have a cold, and the signs or symptoms of crackling sounds in the ear will proceed till the chilly has run its course. It’s possible you’ll acquire a blocked Eustachian tube like a end result of fluid or mucus, which prospects into a assemble up of pressure on a person aspect in the ear. This strain will get released once you stretch your jaw, yawn, chew or swallow.

Valsalva Maneuver

It is an additional cause you may listen to a crackling sound or a popping sound within your ear whenever you conduct these steps. Crackling in Ear – Solutions Some simple approaches to tackle crackling seems within your ear are as follows. Yawning or stretching your jaw: Often this uncomplicated motion can cause a popping sound within your ear and put an close into the crackling sound you hear. Chewing gum/sucking on the lozenge: It really is widespread for the ears to receive blocked or to hear a crackling sound when you are in the substantial velocity elevator or with a flight. Some individuals also knowledge ear soreness when with a plane for the duration of consider off and landing. This can be as a result of stress fluctuations that occur. Chewing on one thing can assist relieve this ache.

Valsalva Maneuver

This really is to assist release any pressure made up in your ear. The Vasalva Maneuver includes pinching your nostrils collectively when your mouth is shut after which attempting to exhale with power. Properly doing this workout will crystal clear your ears and stop any crackling seems. The Valsalva maneuver is very powerful in conditions the place higher altitude results in the sensation of blocked ears. In case you find that the solutions over will not offer considerably relief, it truly is suggested that you stop by an ENT professional, who’ll be greater equipped to diagnose your difficulty. Though ‘crackling in ear’ could be a significant irritation, quite a few usually dismiss it or postpone seeking help. Nevertheless, correct care may offer substantial relief and assist in arresting it easily.

Post-post-script. I don't know what I did wrong, but it appears that I have stepped on an internet minefield. I never in my born days wanted some sort of obnoxious pop-up ad on my blog - I didn't willingly make it happen. Maybe it was that link to the Valsalva Maneuver (which, by the way, was a severe warning not to do it), or the fact that Julian's medical treatise came off a bizarre and totally shitty site featuring people who have about as much medical training as Abbott and Costello. Never mind: I just want this OFF me! I tried going on the net for information about this and got so much gibberish and arcane bafflegab that I became totally depressed. I don't know what any of it means. Makes me feel like an obsolete old horse.

If this is a one-time thing, then fine, I will bite the bullet. But perhaps my blog's immune system has been violated by some virus: ironically, in a post about trying to get rid of viruses.

Hosting these things is spozed-ta earn you all sorts of money, isn't it?, but you can't do that if you don't even know it's there, can you? If you have it forced on you? Someone else is making all the money, obviously.

Now I have TWO viruses to get rid of.