“So the biopsy results are interesting. Have you seen these?”
“No”
“They indicate… interesting” He gets up and leaves the exam room.
Crickets chirping
He returns with a book, opens it to scary pictures of gangrenous fingers, thumbing through, reading.
“So you have blood clots in the vessels in your fingers, which tells me that…” He gets up again, closes the book and leaves the exam room again.
He returns, sans book, sits down and looks at my hands again. “So you had a pulmonary embolus when you were in the hospital last August.”
“Ummm, I had some blood clots in my arm”
“And your lungs”
“… really?”
“And the issue is that now that you have them in your hands, well it could be the Behcet’s, or it could be a clotting factor problem, or it could be something else”
Wow – so much data – so many specifics… WTF? “Huh?”
“So you need to be seen by a hematologist.” At this point he gets up, walks out to the front desk, and calls some doctor. He isn’t in, and he leaves a message for him. He then returns to the exam room.
“Tell me what kind of exercise you are doing.”
“I am running some now…”
“And what guidelines are you following?”
“Well, I am supposed to keep my heart rate under 150. But – well, I guess I will just be honest here… If I were to do that, I would only make it about 2 blocks… so I stay below 165, which seems to be working for me.”
He gives me a deer in the headlights stare and tells me no more running until they figure out what is going on. He goes on to explain that another pulmonary embolism will kill me. The only reason I apparently didn’t die before was because I was in the ICU when it happened. Allrightythen.
His in-and-out, on-the-phone-off-the-phone, broken conversations continued for TWO HOURS. After which he tried to take blood from me. Six times. He didn’t get a drop. So off to the hospital I went for some clotting tests and other blood work. Where – they tried MANY MORE TIMES, and finally called in the PIC team to get blood. It was horrible. They said that I have some of the worst veins they have ever seen, and recommended a PIC or central line if I need much more blood work. That is NOT going to happen in my lifetime…freaks.
So now I wait to hear from my doctor so that I can go see another doctor. I am seeing a trend here in visiting doctors and paying money so that they can find out nothing, but just continue to scare the crap out of me.