...
My big fat slob cardiologist says there isn't the good machinery here for this, so I had to drive two hours down to Eureka for the full monte in the casual-yet-so-chic clinic dedicated to snooping around in yer guts.
Against all odds, and my hatred for veering off 101 in Eureka for any reason notwithstanding, I drove directly there just like I knew what I was doing, which I certainly didn't. I was 45 minutes early because I had left time for my boneheadedness when compelled to endure anything antithetical to my spiritual imperatives.
I've been having intermittent left tibialis anterior muscle cramps since late last night. Eight or ten of them in the two hours the way down, and another eight or ten in the two hours the way back. This is a runner's problem. I do not run. I have not run in memory, and outright never have I run for exercise.
Maybe I'm not getting enough potassium... or not drinking enough water... or... wtf?
I am currently kneading the living snot out of my stupid left tibialis anterior muscle and doing this stupid exercise in the hope it stops the stupid cramps.
The machine reading my heart and aorta, et cetera, today, came complete with lurid sound effects. My heart sounds like an antique washing machine and my aorta sounds like a rather briskly burbling brook. My guts are very audibly quite wet.
If the results of this little investigatory adventure are not communicated to me by fatso in some sort of reasonable time frame, he's fired. No. Really. My hospital discharge papers AND my online chart seem to imply that everything that can be wrong with a heart is wrong with mine.
Contrary to any tendency to hypochondria, I rather think this is just from a bunch of different doctors and nurses and EMTs and PAs jotting words down and some clerical type just transferring the jottings into a computer. Since they all give the SAME advice and prescriptions for all of these things, anyway, they guess, I guess, what's the damn difference which is what, where and in whom?
Can't get in trouble for missing something if you just put everything vaguely related onto the chart, and give all the same meds and tests for all of them. I'm supposed to comply and die or not as the fates will have it. They think their job is to stent and prescribe and test and mine is to do what I'm told.
Nope.
You take a couple extra minutes to be clear about what you know or think you know about what's going on with my heart, stop barking orders that may or may not bear on my recovery and swishing away, or I figure it out and deal with it myself.
No excuses! Goddammit. Thank you for prying open one of my arteries, I think, but if we're trying to avoid further trouble, you gotta do better than this. You don't need med school for THIS. Truly. I could do this well already.
Just give me a chic lab coat — to which I pin my Red Queen brooch — doc nines — and a Merck Manual, and I can so totally do your job, dude.
And BETTER. Far more entertainingly, and compassionately, too.
pipe up any time....
