My New Cross Fit Workout

And then I started Cross Fit puking. Fun.

Oh, and then I had a massive nose bleed. Which I know isn't exciting or all that relevant, but I don't usually have those and it took an hour to stop so for me personally it was a record breaking event. I assume my entire body contracting for hours on end was a bit too much stress on things.

Man. I am wiped. Such a wonderful quality of life I've got going... Spewing internal fluids everywhere. Growing lumps. Joints falling apart. Covid. Yeesh.

Anyway, working on recovering now. (Which, note I'm still feeling a little 'head has detached from my body and is floating in outer space' so this post might be interesting.)

As for why...who knows? Maybe it's the MRI contrast or the allergy to the contrast or maybe food poisoning or a bug. I don't know. All I can say is no one else is sick so far, so it's probably my own internal fuckery. As usual.

BUT the MRI came back good. Everything is stable. Both liver and pancreas. Thank goodness.

If memory serves, I have to do one more next year to babysit the IPMN and then they stop caring? I think that's right. I mean, they'll want to keep going with the liver, but I'm going to try and go every other year after I finish babysitting the pancreas. I'm tired of this. I want less of it.

That said, I have imaging set up for yet another thing. Sigh. Just an ultrasound though. Which, while I'm happy for a low stress imaging method, I hope it's enough. I have a grapefruit size bulge in my lower stomach* that I noticed a few months ago, and in my body, you can't let that stuff slide, you have to look at it.

And I'm supposed to have a breast MRI but I'm not even sure I'll get to it this year. Both on their end of logistics and mine. (I'll have a mammogram though.)

I'm beginning to wonder if my body will outpace the logistics and capacity available to care for it. I can only go to so many doctor appointments. Time is finite here. I only have so much stamina and bandwidth and other responsibilities and obligations. That capacity is pretty fixed.

Right now I'm trying to push all medical stuff I can out into the fall. I want the summer off (as much as I can finagle). I want to work and go have a good time, enjoy the summer. (I'm super stupid excited about swimming, about hopefully having my mobility back after this foot surgery.) Our recent trip didn't fix my health, I still had issues, but it was so much more fun to have health issues and do interesting things anyway vs. going to the doctor all the time. 

My life is out of balance. 

My current fantasy involves medical tourism to do whole body MRIs and PET scans so I can JUST BE DONE and KNOW WHAT'S IN THERE without the gauntlet of fifty billion appointments. Can you imagine? Instant road map. No more appointment appointment appointment appointment appointment. I could problem solve from actual findings instead of guessing. No stuff there? Then I don't care if you hurt or malfunction. Fuck off.  Yes, tumor or arthritis or whatever in places with symptoms? Okay, you get a doctor.

This is part of what I was hoping genetics would help with--finding that unifying diagnosis to maybe achieve some degree of efficiency in my care. I'm not happy with how they refused to keep testing. Anymore all my specialists bring up genetics now. All. Of. Them. But actual genetics gave up trying to find a pattern. 

Although, that said, medicine is so fucking inefficient with multi specialty stuff, I don't even know if an umbrella diagnosis would help me. There are too many tumors in too many places. I need a rare/chronic disease primary care something. I need a go-to person who helps me sort through the noise without a billion specialist appointments. Who helps me push the system into making one MRI do many things (which I don't think this is even a thing in medicine, but it could be).

Hell, just a basic program for the 'medically complex' that facilitates things like making all my follow up appointments for one day would be amazing. If I could concentrate 4 or 6 appointments into one day, that'd be a huge improvement. This endless drip of appointments is killing me.

But what I need doesn't exist. There is no efficiency for patients. There is only efficiency for profits.

If I want less doctor time, it's on me to engineer it. But that comes with the risk that something will be left unattended too long. I don't know where the line is and medicine is zero help with that. There's no math I can rely on. I'm on my own. 

And you know, you don't want to hurt yourself, but when you can't easily tell what the actual risk is...it's a lot to navigate. If you screw it up, you'll hate yourself. If you over do it, you'll hate yourself. You get regrets on either side of the line. But where even is the line? Where's the balance? I have no fucking clue. 

Medical tourism sounds like balance to me right now. Working off actual data is highly attractive to me. Let's find the unknowns and make them known. Let's go fast instead of slow. Stop acting like my time has no value, that it's okay for medicine to completely take over my life. Optimize this shit.

I am actually working on getting new passports for everyone in order to visit family before they pass so...hmm. Maybe I'll pull something off along those lines. 

(But caveat, having data from outside the authorized process flow doesn't mean doctors will accept it and I imagine skipping over all the time suck diagnostic work flows could cause some insurance approval issues, so it's not a clean win I don't think.)

*Way to bury the lede, right? But frankly, I've reached the point of so what on this stuff. If I lost my shit every time something was weird, I'd die of stress. My body grows things. Lots of things. Mostly they're benign in the absolutely most annoying high maintenance way. Probably someday something will be more serious, but until then just stay calm, get the imaging, and carry on.