If my head wasn’t in a weird place I could make this funny, but right now I’m sort of messed up and it feels like lying not to write about it.
A few weeks ago I decided to get a head-start on the litany of exams that come around when you’re 40, so I had a thousand (12) x-rays, and eleventy billion (6) blood draws, and one (1) weird boob exam. The mammogram thing wasn’t that bad and was way less uncomfortable than when you swallow a Dorito wrong. (That’s my baseline for pain.) It’s just weird to have another woman curiously man-handling your boobs, but I suggest just realizing that this is what she’s chosen to do for a living, or maybe just pretend you’re in college again.
The nice thing about the mammogram though was that I got to fill out a form with boobies drawn all over it and I had to mark any scars I had, and I have one right under my right boob from when I was stabbed and when the mammographer looked at the form she was like “YOU WERE STABBED IN THE BOOB?” And I was like “No, I was stabbed under the boob. By a doctor. During emergency surgery.” And then she just looked at me like that didn’t count, but it totally does because either way, someone stuck a knife into me on purpose.
Long story short, I don’t have breast cancer. Yay! But they found some other growth in my neck that’s causing abnormal labs and probably needs to get biopsied. Not quite as yay. But I had the same growth 10 years ago and got it biopsied and it wasn’t cancer then and eventually it just went away, so I suspect it’s a silent twin that’s just swimming around in my body and fucking shit up.
The good news is that my rheumatoid-arthritis-miracle-drug has not only kept me out of a wheelchair for the last year, but the damaged bone deformation is healing and my bone-density is now crazy high. That’s a good sign, but I suspect it also means that my bones are enormous and are making me fat. Thanks a lot, bones. You’re a bunch of assholes. But the upside is that when my doctor points out that I’m still a bit overweight I can blame the fact that I LITERALLY just became big-boned and that she’s giving me mixed messages. (I know people with RA are going to ask what I’m on and it’s monthly Simponi injections. There are lots of side-effects and they’re expensive and don’t work for everyone, but they work for me.)
There were also the expected number of blood diseases and clotting disorders and auto-immune diseases that popped up, but at this point I’m sort of collecting those sorts of things, so nothing majorly upsetting. The thing that did bother me though was something that technically shouldn’t have messed me up as much as it did. Turns out I have a severe b12 deficiency. They don’t think it’s pernicious anemia (which is a terrible problem with a very fun name) but it’s enough that they immediately started me on injections and pills and a warning that this level of b12 deficiency often causes delirium, which explains a lot. Technically it’s a good diagnosis, because it would explain my chronic fatigue, and it can cause depression and symptoms of ADD, and multiple miscarriages, and of lots of other things I’ve struggled with, but it’s also strangely upsetting to find that one damn vitamin might have been what’s been making me miserable for years. And more upsetting is the fact that I still feel exactly as exhausted as I did before we started the treatment, so God knows if this will even work or if it’ll just be another bullet-point in my list-of-shit-that’s-wrong-with-me.
I should be happy that things weren’t worse, and relieved that I have the resources to diagnose and maybe fix the problems, but today I’m just sick and tired of being sick and tired, and I can’t find a way to end this paragraph.
I blame the delirium.