soystud said...
good luck ncot's surgeon -
Surgeon's registrar: think my hospital doctors will do anything not to see me >_>.
I must admit, the hospital visit today did absolutely nothing to raise my spirits whatsoever. Before I even set foot inside the hospital, my blood pressure is sky high from trying to find a parking space - which in this hospital are rarer than gold dust. Plus some absolute imbecile decided I wasn't going to do a right turn into the car park; felt like getting out of my car to tell him did he
want me to hit the front of his car, 'cos I would quite gladly do that for him.
Somehow I made it to the appointment in time, but had to wait a whole hour anyway. (Not normal for the surgeon; have usually seen her fairly quickly.) As implied above, I didn't even get to see my surgeon, but the registrar, who I've never met before. There was also a gormless-looking medical student present.
As predicted, the registrar asked me about
my symptoms. I ****ing hate answering that question, because I always feel like they're on the lookout for red flag symptoms - and if you don't have them, they're not interested. I could exaggerate my symptoms with total ease, knowing the sort of stuff they want to know. But I'm not a liar and I won't play up my symptoms.
And as usual, I probably came across as a sullen weirdo. I went off on a bit of a rant about
how my hospital had done absolutely nothing for me since surgery. The registrar said something with the words "faecal calprotectin" in it: I instantly told him my GP had arranged that for me, not the hospital. I told him I felt like it hadn't necessarily needed to go this far [colectomy surgery] and that earlier doctors had ignored my symptoms for years and it felt like deja vu.
At some point, probably just to get a break from me, he went off to have a talk with my surgeon. Came back and basically said, yeah, it's been nearly 2 years since your surgery, might as well have a scan (I'm paraphrasing a tad). My mum joked later on that the surgeon had probably told the registrar to give me anything I asked for just to get rid of me. It was just a joke and I saw the funny side of it, but it also struck a bit too close to home!
So I'm gonna have an MRI scan (probably in 3-4 weeks) and a flexible sigmoidoscopy to check my rectum.
I got what I basically went in for, but I still had a severe depression on the way home - probably wasn't fit to drive, tbh, the state I was in. I honestly fear that one day I am going to have a complete meltdown in a doctor's office: and I don't just mean sounding sullenly pissed off, I mean thumping/kicking walls and yelling and screaming. I feel like yelling to somebody you don't know what it's like to live in fear every day of unpleasant symptoms, you don't know what it's like to
live with these symptoms. Yeah, right now I'm not critically ill and I'm not in any danger of dying, but in my darkest thoughts I sometimes wonder if it would be better if I had let the Crohn's take its natural course (let's not beat about
the bush: kill me) than to live with this anger and resentment and worry.
I can kinda understand medical staff getting burnt out and losing their compassion (as an impatient in hospital, I often heard or saw distressed elderly ladies being ignored by the nurses. No comfort or kind words given. The nurses were too rushed off their feet and had probably long since become inured to the sounds of elderly people in distress). But doctors? Man, they hardly see their patients as it is. I suppose they're too busy being an 'important person' to try to understand their patients either.
On the plus side, I saw my autism nurse yesterday and that meeting went very well. Pity the good memories of that were wiped out by the horrific memories brought back to me today!
And if anyone has read all this crap without skimming, have an internet
cookie. You deserve it.