Today’s fresh hell : a big black lesion on my right foot. Discovered it last night when I noticed some fairly bad pain on that foot and lo and behold, nastiness.
It’s jet black, around the size of a quarter, dry, slightly recessed into the flesh, hard, and somewhat tender to the touch.
Lesion might not be the right word, but something’s seriously fucked.
Which means I am probably going to have to go to the ER for it. My GP Doctor Chao is not doing any more in-person office hours this year and call me old-fashioned but I just can’t make myself believe that he can do much for me if he can’t see the damned thing.
And true, there’s walk-in clinics, but I have absolutely no faith in them. Every time I have gone to one, I’ve received lousy care. Not gonna do it.
So the ER it is. I should go right away, but I am too tired today. After last night’s misadventure, I need some serious recharge time.
Oh right. Last night’s misadventure.
I got to the hospital and did the CT scan no problem. The tech was very nice and the procedure was quite easy.
They had to put in an IV to give me the tracer dye that would really make my organs “pop” on the CT scan. No sweat, whatever.
It had been so long since my last CT scan that I had forgotten, and got to delightedly re-experience, what an awesomely science fiction experience it is.
Because you have this mysterious ring around you that slowly spins up with cool mechanical acceleration sounds like they are spinning up the warp core.
The ring is behind translucent blue plastic, which only makes it more surreal.
Anyhow, procedure complete, everybody was lovely, could not have enjoyed having my internal organs scanned with a powerful electromagnet more.
I then needed to call Joe to come pick me up. Simple, n’est-ce pas?
Just go to the Medical Imaging receptionist and give her Joe’s cell number and she will take care of the rest. Right?
But I had a mental malfunction and misremembered Joe’s number. So instead we bothered some poor random dude. Twice.
Distraught, I wandered over to the main entrance area. By the time I got there, I realized my error, and I was planning to ask the very nice Information Desk lady I had met on the way in if I can use her phone.
She was gone. Fuck. Now what?
I decided to go outside and see if I could see where Joe had parked. I looked around both lots, no dice. I then decided to go back inside so I could swallow my pride and go back to Medical Imaging and confess my error and get in touch with Joe using the correct phone number this time.
Tends to speed things up.
But uh oh…. the door had locked behind me. Turns out that the Information Desk lady had buzzed me in without my knowing when I came in the first time, and now that she was gone, there was nobody to let me in.
So I was stuck outside in the cold. Lovely.
After an embarrassingly long period of dithering in the cold and standing at the door hoping SOMEONE was monitoring it (because, ya know, sick people), it finally occurred to me to walk over to the Emergency entrance and ask to use a phone there.
Turns out, miracle of miracles, there’s an ancient artifact there known as a “pay phone” and I was able to contact Joe that way.
The whole thing was exactly the sort of comedy of errors to which I am prone, and I am so goddamned tired of my own bullshit.
I try so hard to keep it together and not trip over my own dick all the time and yet it happens over and over again.
And I’d like to be cheerfully fatalistic about it and say “Oh well, it always turns out okay in the end after all, so no big deal, right?”, but I can’t.
I just don’t have that in me, at least, not yet.
And one of these times it won’t turn out okay.
And then I will be seriously fucked.
More after the break.
A lighter shade of pain
UPDATE : The thing on my right foot is not, as it turns out, black. That was just something that got stuck to it, apparently.
But it remains hard, dry, sore, and so on. So some time tomorrow afternoon, Joe and Julian will be nice enough to take me out to
- Cash my monthly check – it’s a week early because Xmas
- Pee in a cup at the medical lab re : my abdominal issues, then
- (sigh) Drop me off at the ER.
I don’t want to go to the ER. A previous, less sensible and responsible version of myself would have just ignored the problem hoping it would go away on its own.
But that would be real real dumb. Foot problems in diabetics can turn deadly in a heartbeat, so if I want my own heart to keep beating (and I mostly do), I had better get this looked at right away.
I just have to suppress the socially anxious voice in my head that keeps asking, “But what if it turns out to be nothing? We’ll be SO EMBARRASED!!”
First off, it ain’t nothing. The pain is quite real, as is the hard spot on my foot. It may or may not be something serious, but it’s definitely something.
But even it wasn’t anything, it would still be the right decision to have it checked out.
Like my mama always used to say, better a little embarrassment than septic death.
So I will schlep through the ER and triage and all of that. I might be there awhile.
Pretty sure “I have this thing on my foot” is relatively low on the triage priority list compared to “there’s a ski pole protruding from my chest” and “pretty sure I am supposed to be breathing”.
I will, of course, keep you lucky people up to date on all my horrible health problems.
And I will talk to you nice people tomorrow.