Best Medicine

At the very least, it looks like my mom will end up spending a week in the hospital, where she's been since last Thursday after experiencing heart palpitations. She's feeling fine, and once the doctors are satisfied that her blood is taking to enough of the Coumadin they're giving her to prevent future Atrial fibrillation, they should discharge her. There's a goal number of “2” that they're trying for, and right now she's at “1.6” or so. I'm not sure what those are units of, only that she's almost free. After that she'll probably have to continue taking the medication, which is a blood thinner, watch her diet, and go in for regular blood tests to make sure the cure is working, and that it isn't worse than the disease.

In between visits to his own doctors, my dad's been staying with her during the day. He stops home in the afternoon, and when I get home from work we go back up there together. It's been years since we all watched Jeopardy! together, and if nothing else this experience has forced us to spend quality time together as a family. I think they've dumbed down the answers a bit since I stopped watching. I'm not that smart and only got a lot of questions right when they had student contestants and easier answers. It's funny how a health crisis can change a situation. Some nights I come home from work, log on to my computer or watch a movie, and don't really feel like talking to my folks. Now, though tired, I sit with them for a few hours and share stories from my day. I've even checked in with my mom with my cell phone during my lunch break. She's probably enjoying that while it lasts.

Though my mom is the one in the hospital, I think my dad's the one I need to keep an eye on. His hearing is getting worse, and he insists that one of his doctors was wrong when he advised him to get a hearing aid. “The battery dies every week!” is one of his excuses, while the main one is an insistence that he has a lot of wax, even though the doctor said otherwise. “He was lying to sell the hearing aid! There has to be wax in there.” Thursday night I found a Q-tip on the bathroom floor, little flecks of red on each end. I advised him not to poke around in there so hard. “That's blood? I thought that was wax!” One of these days it's going to be brain matter if he's not careful.

My dad also insists on “testing” himself to see if he really has a heart problem. Fourteen years ago he was diagnosed with clogged arteries and given 2-5 years to live without bypass surgery. He radically altered his diet, started going for Chelation therapy to clean out his veins, and the numbers prove that he's doing something right. But he'll be 78 this Sunday, and needs to realize that he's going to get winded if he walks too fast, and needs to slow down and let his medication work. He thinks he can take a hit from his heart spray and immediately run a marathon, and it just doesn't work that way. “If I use the spray and still get a pain, then it's not my heart that's the problem!” When we went to see my mom on Wednesday night, he pushed past another old man as soon as the elevator doors opened, and practically sprinted down the hallway. “Where's the fire?” I asked, trying to keep up. “They have some nice pictures on the walls here, don't they?” he replied, having no idea what I'd said. That's me in 45 years, which is a little scary.

My mom has a very nice roommate, and in a small world her husband is friends with a musician my dad and I know. They're great people, and the husband has a good sense of humor. He told us on our last visit about how he had a cow valve in his heart. He wanted a pig valve, but he said LIJ wouldn't give him something that wasn't kosher. The wife's doctor is someone I stopped going to, because his practice got too busy. A few years back, there were about four doctors sharing that office, and once I got past the inexplicably angry receptionist to make an appointment, I never got to see my doctor, always one of the others. When I had what probably was a panic attack back in 2004, experiencing an unusually rapid heartbeat of my own while running on a treadmill, I immediately made an appointment, after a visit to an emergency room cost a lot of money for doctors to tell me it was probably “just a bug” and I should “go to Hawaii”. Having ignored symptoms of serious illness in the past, nearly bleeding to death from a rare birth defect because I waited so long to check it out, I had learned my lesson. I didn't want to become a hypochondriac, but a checkup is worth the peace of mind of hearing I'm okay from a professional.

I went in for a visit with one of the other doctors, and after speaking with me about the treadmill incident she suggested I cut back on caffeine, and perhaps it was anxiety. She wanted to prescribe Xanax to me, “just to see” if it worked. At that point she'd only spoken to me, hadn't so much as listened to my breathing with a stethoscope. I didn't even have a blood test, and didn't like the idea of being given a pill to see if there was anything wrong with me. “If it helps then that was your problem” seemed random and dangerous. I might as well get medical advice from my father.

I didn't go the route of altering my chemical balance. I went for more tests and saw other doctors, ruled out various possibilities. It was a frightful couple of months, and occasionally writing proved therapeutic, but the biggest problem seemed to be dizzy spells and tingling whenever I was behind the wheel of a car, occasionally some facial swelling. I had everything from my blood to my lungs to my heart to my brain looked at, and finally I gave up on doctors. I asked a woman in a health food store about my problem, and she suggested a rescue remedy. If the essence of flowers in a little spray bottle cured me, I could care less whether it was a placebo effect or if it actually worked. Even though consciously I knew I was fine, I needed to convince my subconscious. It took months, but through a combination of that remedy and the realization that I never did pass out, even when I felt like I was suffocating and spinning, I soon moved on. It's come back to a lesser degree in the last few weeks, but knowing what it is makes it easier to handle and recover more quickly. Still, I've eliminated things like caffeine, soda, and the chunk of butter I'd melt into a bowl of pasta three nights a week, thrown in some exercise whenever possible, and that's definitely making me feel better.

So, I gave the couple in my mom's hospital room a much abridged version about my dips into insanity, just telling the first portion about how I stopped going to that office because the doctor they gave me was ready to prescribe medication without a real examination. They told me the office is up to six doctors, and I asked what the names of the new ones were. I couldn't remember the name of the one I saw, but it wasn't any of the ones they mentioned. I described her, and told them this incident took place about four years ago. “Oh her,” said the wife with a frown, “She's gone; fired. They got rid of her a while back.” I was surprised insofar that I’ve become jaded about people losing their jobs for being incompetent or unqualified.

Justice and logic are the best medicine. Thanks to everyone who's been expressing concern about my mom; hopefully I'll move on to other topics very soon.