Much Medicine Too Doctor

 It feels like we're aiming to break a world record over here. Four different medical things today. Two appointments. Two tests. Two medical campuses. In five hours, which isn't bad to be honest. I got lucky that the tests could be done at the same campus as one of the appointments and the waits were short.

I saw the rheum, who is being proactive. I have to say, the ageism in medicine at some point works for you instead of against you and I appear to be there. I didn't ask to be tested for RA. I don't think I have it, but they want to test to be sure. I've never had doctors who wanted to test to be sure of anything until the past year.  It's like opposite day.

Also, I'm hypermobile too. But like, normal hypermobile. It's not causing issues* like it does for the teen. Still...kind of interesting to be told that. I had no idea.

The rheum plan is once my foot surgery is over, I'll do PT and then we move on to injections. 

So blood work. X-rays. And two appointments.

Kiddo had a specialist follow up. Doc was super dismissive and rude and a poor listener. Akin to the doc who told me I had diarrhea and just didn't know it. Needlessly contentious. Unwilling to hear it. Denial of reality to the point where it's ridiculous. We're going to be switching to someone else. 

It wasn't a total bust. We got some things sorted and the treatment needed. They did their job, but it'd be nice to not be told that, essentially, everything we're telling them isn't true and that everything we do is wrong...when that's not what we said we did.

We have a day coming up with 3 appointments in 3 different cities. That's going to suck. Hubby has to  cover for me with the teen as I have my presurgery stuff for the neuroma.

I hope we're about done for the teen. I think we're zeroing in on some things that are working and that will, hopefully, keep working. In theory, we'll have a formal baseline established shortly that she can work off of to see what can be optimized and how she can work around her limitations. I hope. I mean, I can't see how much more we can do.

There is that one lingering issue that may require us to travel because it's a major quality of life issue. However, at the moment, medication #11 is apparently working. We are all holding our breath hoping this is THE ONE. 

*Per se. It's not helping me now, but has been largely a non issue aside from also being clumsy and prone to falls as a kid myself...which it all makes way more sense now that I have additional context. I just never had it to where it caused enough dysfunction to hold me back too much. I could control my body whereas the teen flails and has a lot more pain. Huh. 

But part of the reason I take the teen so seriously is I was breaking bones and dislocating joints at her age. My falls down stairs didn't end well. We're lucky she hasn't had those injuries yet, she bounces better than I did. 

But the knee I dislocated at 14 --doing something that typically doesn't cause dislocations-- is a huge PITA as I age. I expect I'll need a joint replacement or some kind of surgical intervention down the road. 

Sometimes I wonder why we aren't more interested in injury prevention. A lot of injuries have major impact on quality of life in our later years. Like, football as it's played now makes no sense to me. That's just asking to be disabled in your 40s in an era where you could, in theory, live to be a 100. Same goes for a lot of activities. We all ooo and ahh over Tom Brady's long career, but dude will have won the luck lottery if he doesn't have to fuse his spine together and replace half his joints before he's 60.

We don't need to wear bubble wrap, but we could do more to prevent injuries with a vicious long tail. Why we don't bother is weird to me.