Dispatches from the Disabled List

 I see a therapist.  He and I discuss my mental/emotional state and how I can better mitigate the sturm and drang that I face.  Losing my career well before I planned to left me with an insufficient toolbox to repair the damage caused by my mourning process.  Seeing someone who could give me tools was the only way I figured I'd make it to the other side. Recently I have been talking about all the issues I'm facing.  I have feelings of inadequacy and a certain dread of the future.  Dr. Seth has given me some things to help it along, my favorite being to stop saying "What if?" (as in "What if I have prostate cancer?  What if my ejection fraction doesn't return to a level that will allow me to function?"), and instead say "Even if", as in "Even if I have prostate cancer, it's a relatively manageable type of cancer to have.  And Even if my ejection fraction doesn't improve, I understand my limits and will develop a new set of regimens ...

The great American Philosopher Thomas Earl Petty said it best: The waiting is the hardest part Every day you see one more card You take it on faith, you take it to the heart The waiting is the hardest part Tom has expressed my current situation most concisely and most perfectly.  I have less than 24 hours to wait before my Urologist shares with me the results of a more sophisticated PSA test.  It will most likely reveal whether I have Prostate Cancer.  That "one more card" will go a long way to inform what will happen in 2023. Not that I'm all that spun up about it:  a previous missive in this space expressed my disdain for tippy-toeing around the word "cancer" since if I indeed have cancer, I already have it and saying the word won't make any practical difference.  And once I learn (if I learn, and there's a greater than zero chance that I don't have cancer), it then creates new decision trees that allow me to perceive I'm being proactive.   My ...

I received an early Christmas present from the US Healthcare System.  As I opened the box it came in, I discovered another box.  Inside that was---wait for it---yet another box.  I continued to drill down in my Cardboard Russian Nesting Doll until I found the last box.  Inside was---nothing.   Some context is required to see the gallows humor in all of it.  It all started with my Urologist, who wanted an MRI of my prostate due to an explosive growth in my PSA from somewhere in the 3.0 range to 8.98.  Since I take finasteride, a drug designed to shrink the prostate over time, the true PSA is actually double the 8.98, or 17.96.  The technical term for that reading is "HOLY SHIT!" Possessing a whiz-bang pacemaker that is capable of allowing MRIs, I began the process of getting one.  And that's when the boxes began to multiply.  First off, my Urology practice has a relationship with a hospital that doesn't have a relationship with Medtr...

As Dennis Miller is fond of saying--"I don't want to get into a rant here, but..." Well, I DO want to get into a rant.  I've been ranting for several years now.  It's about time, and in particular the value of said time.  My soapbox is cleaned, shined and freshly painted.  Time to get on it: It's no secret that waiting is the coin of the realm when we go to our healthcare providers.  We make appointments, show up early for those appointments, then wait.  And wait.  Past our "appointment" time.  And the longer I wait, the higher my already-high blood pressure goes.  It's golf course tee times writ large.  Too many players, not enough space (physical and chronological) between them.   I spend a lot of time in healthcare providers' offices.  I want to spend less time there, and the best way for that to happen is to make an appointment, see the provider(s), then go home.  But once that "appointment" is made, the process b...

I visited my urologist the other day.  Like so many of my medical providers, my urologist has hundreds of patients, so I actually met with his Nurse Practioner. (NP)  With other providers it's a Physician's Assistant (PA), or even, sometimes, the actual doctor.  I don't give it any nevermind because I'm sure that the NP or PA (should it be P'sA?  It's like the plural for RBI.  Shouldn't it be RsBI? I digress, which is my wont) or MD has notes somewhere that everyone contributes to, and if not I have my memory (which is still decent, Allah/Xenu/Vishnu/Jesus be praised).   My NP assumed a somewhat somber tone, and told me my PSA was 8.98.  Since I'm medicated for my Benign Prostate Hyperplasia (BPH), that  8.98 is doubled for reference purposes, meaning it's almost 19.   This is where people get nervous and begin to be careful about what they say and what words they use.  And what's the word everyone stays away from?  Yep, C...

The Medical Profession goes by a neat slogan:  "First, do no harm".  It encapsulates a way of doing business that helps put the patient at ease.  "At least they won't do more harm than good".  I'm reminded of the Calvin & Hobbes strip where Calvin is at the doctor's office.  The doctor says "This won't hurt a bit" while brandishing a hypodermic needle.  Calvin, ever the rake, answered "Well, let me jab that thing in YOUR butt, and we'll see".   Doing no harm doesn't mean handing out zero pain, or discomfort, or having the Cure be worse than the Disease.  They've come up with a new word--"pressure"--to describe pain.  "You'll feel some pressure", when translated from the original deSade means "this is gonna hurt but we'll minimize it by calling it something much more innocuous." As we learn what we don't got in pursuit of what we do got, we are often subjected to "press...