[Jenna120]

Last year I woke up in pain that was really, really bad. I ended up having one of those rare things that no one ever gets so there were a couple of misdiagnoses before I got proper treatment. You know how they always ask "On a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being the worst pain you've had...." Well, this reset my pain scale. My previous worst pain went from a 10 to a 5.5 or 6, that's how bad the pain was.

It took about 2½ months to get proper treatment. Nothing they gave me worked on the pain. I did refuse narcotics for a stupid reason. Narcotics have always given me really bad motion sickness, like when you are really drunk and the room starts spinning and I end up puking, and I wanted to be functional for work. If I was smart, I'd have gone on FMLA sooner, just stopped working rather than using FMLA leave for my physical therapy appointments and told work to kiss my hiney. Knowing what I know now narcotics wouldn't have been effective on the pain either so I'd probably have ended up addicted, so maybe it worked out for the best. But during that time I have no idea what all was given to me for pain, plus the ibuprofen and aspirin I was taking on my own, plus my psych meds.

Well I got past that point, completed the move I was also in the middle of during this time, and lost insurance. Goodbye psych meds, cold turkey no less. I was miserable, and so was my family because I couldn't shield them from my moods, no matter how hard I tried. I had problems finding a job and finally got one in retail so goodbye cushy office job too.

Finally got insurance back, the first pdoc ended up with his own health care crisis before I got stable and couldn't practice medicine anymore. The next was a psych NP and she actually made me worse. I'm on #3 now. Also during this time my elbow and my shoulder started hurting. Tendonitis in two different areas in my elbow and also in my shoulder. The shoulder hurt so bad that I actually did all those home things the doctor tells you to do.

The elbow is getting better, one of the tendonitis area is completely healed, the other one is still getting there. But the shoulder is unchanged. Now the doctor is talking about a rotator cuff tear. I have an MRI on Thursday. I asked why the heck this was happening and he said that basically I went from no activity to heavy activity very suddenly and my body can't keep up with the load. My right arm started off weaker than the rest of my body (weird condition that no one gets caused that) and now it's having wear and tear injuries.

At the same time the new psych NP is clearly a cautious provider and wanted me to get a routine EKG just to make sure none of my medicines were causing prolonged QT interval. His office also checks your weight and blood pressure every appointment and my blood pressure has been pretty high, 150/100. Before now I've sometimes been just borderline high, usually just this side of normal, so I was a little concerned. This was the first blood pressure check in 10 months, it was normal 10 months ago.

I got the EKG Friday and picked up the results today. Well, I don't have prolonged QT interval, that's the good news. The rest, I Googled and there's always a chance of a false positive, but it says I've had a heart attack at some point and half my heart is enlarged. Eek! I had a completely normal EKG in 2014.

So wondering what the chances are for a bunch of false positives and wondering if this is related to the blood pressure, I made an appointment with my doctor and faxed him the EKG so he had it in case they were related. Less than an hour later his office called and the woman insisted several times that I get a cardiologist immediately. Not whenever, immediately. Okay, that's not creating warm fuzzies for the possibility of false positives. This area is crazy when it comes to doctors. The PCPs have a 3 month new patient wait list which is why I've been driving two hours to my old doctor (which is why he couldn't do a referral). The cardiologist? I have an appointment Wednesday.

Well at work this was on my mind non-stop. How the heck could I have had a heart attack and not known it? Shouldn't there have been at least a little "I don't feel right"? And I'm pre-menopausal, women my age just don't have heart attacks. And I realized that during that 2½ months of crazy high pain I'd have never felt it, since the arm pain was so terrible and I was taking everything from muscle relaxers to steroids to prescription NSAIDs. And then I realized that if there's not four different false positives on the EKG report, if there's actual damage, then it probably was from all that medicine.

And that means if the cardiologist doesn't tell me I'm fine and the report was wrong, I'm going to need to get some bloodwork on my liver and kidneys and whatever else they can test for to see what I did to those.

I'm kinda scared. I've been suicidal in the past so I faced my own mortality then, but it was on my terms. Now I'm facing it on fate's terms, I have no real control. And my shoulder is killing me, like it always does after work, so I'm miserable from that. And I'm scared I'm going to lose my psych drugs.

I'm sick and tired of being sick and tired, I want no more pain, I want stability and I want to be healthy. That's not too much to ask, is it?

[Skeezyks]

[Jenna120]

The MRI machine broke in the middle of the scan this morning. So I won't know what's wrong with the shoulder for another week.

The cardiologist was very reassuring, yada yada, false positives happen all the time. Great bedside manner. He ordered a heart ultrasound and a stress test to (as he put it) just make sure these are false positives. Had the stress test this afternoon, at least none of the machines broke, ultrasound tomorrow.

With luck, by Monday afternoon I should know what kind of shape my heart is in. Thursday is the psych, he's going to flip when he sees the EKG so I'm going to have the other reports with me. Next Monday I should know about the shoulder, with luck I'm just a wimp and it's only a very stubborn case of tendonitis.

I hope the light at the end of the tunnel is not a train coming at me.