utenzi

My doctor's appointment on Tuesday morning launched me into my waning years, I'm afraid. Now I admit this isn't the official way to define the "golden stage" of life, but to me once you have to take a drug everyday you're old. Today I picked up some statins to control cholesterol and they have to be taken every day. But it could have happened sooner. My doctor wanted me to take high blood pressure meds a couple of months ago. I had to talk her into running a 24 hour BP monitor instead. Fortunately that test (it checked BP every 15 minutes for a total of nearly 100 datapoints across the 24 hours I had the monitor on--which is a lot more accurate than taking just one BP reading at the doctor's office) Today also marked the second time in recent weeks that people have peeked inside of me. Today it was an echo cardiogram. I was surprised at how much detail it showed. For the most part I was facing away from the screen but the last 5 or 6 minutes I could watch...

In the continuing drama of my medical condition, now my doctor wants me examined by allergy folk. So, in around 10 hours, I'll be at that place pictured below. It's an allergy clinic. Don't you just love Google Maps? I really love to look at a place with the satellite setting before I drive there. It's so much easier to navigate when you have a mental picture of what the surroundings look like beforehand. One thing I'm pretty sure of is that I'm allergic to cats. It's the evil that dwells within them, y'know? I'm very sensitive to evil.

For the third day this week (out of 3, mind you) I had medical crap to do. Today was a sonogram. Apparently the hairy nipple in that picture yesterday wasn't sufficient to convince the medical staff that I couldn't be preggers. So despite the silliness of it all, I had a sonogram on my belly today. I guess I'll find out the results in a week or so. The technician was astute enough to notice that I'd had kidney stones in the past. I don't know how obvious it is on a sonogram, but since the two incidents were 8 and 10 years ago, I'd be surprised if there was a lot of evidence / damage remaining. It sure hurt at the time, but I think my stones were pretty small. I didn't have anywhere near the kind of pain that some folk describe. I wasn't going to a doctor back then so I never was checked out afterwards. Oh, by the way, that picture above is the console for the sonogram machine. It was dark in the room so the picture is blurred and grainy. Likewise for t...

My doctor and I disagree about something. She thinks I have high blood pressure. I don't. So to settle this disagreement I have been enlisted to wear this annoying automated Sphygmomanometer for 24 hours. My doctor told me it'd be small and convenient. Ha! Full size cuff, adhesive patch, all that tubing and then the recording device and inflating unit that I hold on to. Jeeze. Every 15 minutes it automatically inflates and my arm has to be straight else it'll force an error message. Since I get no warning that it's about to inflate, and I do a lot of work which requires very fine finger and hand movement, this sidelined me for the day. So I went home. At least I got to catch up on some television that I'd recorded the past few weeks. I turn the unit back in at 8:30am, four and a half hours from now and I suspect I'll be fairly tired (you try to sleep with a cuff inflating on your arm every 15 minutes!). And about a week from now I'll get a letter letting me ...

I came into work yesterday an hour late due to a sore back. I felt okay the night before but when I woke up in the morning I was shocked at the pain I felt when I tried to pop out of bed to take a shower. So instead I took 3 ibuprofen and laid down on a heating pad for 40 minutes then took that shower. It all helped. A little. Today I feel much better and bring this all up due to a study that came out in the Januay 31 issue of the British Medical Journal . According to an accompanying editorial: "The review by Martimo and colleagues confirms how little we know about how to prevent and treat back pain. This may be because back pain is a symptom and not a disease.Or perhaps the disorder cannot be reversed once it becomes established, so that no treatment could be effective. None of the randomised controlled trials or cohort studies included in the reviewfound a positive effect of advice or training in working techniques—with or without lifting equipment—for preventing back pain or ...

What advertisements annoy you? For me, the two right now that piss me off the most are one for zits (I guess, I'm not totally sure) and another for sleeping. The acne one is probably familiar to most of us in the USA--I don't know if it's shown in other countries --because it's so loud and annoying. The product's name is Head On and that name is repeated multiple times in a strident loud female voice, followed by the command "apply directly to the forehead". It's EVIL. Feel free to watch the You Tube video of it if you want to be tortured. The other commercial I find annoying is for Rozerem, which is a prescription sleep medicine, and it's the one with a sleepy guy staggering into his kitchen and talking to Abraham Lincoln and what looks like a giant groundhog but apparently actually is a beaver. The website for this product isn't bad but the commercial is annoying and silly. For anyone that hasn't seen it, the theme is that the critte...