As in, I am writing this after gpoing to my doctor.
I feel good about the fact that I finally got my shit together enough to make the appointment and get my ass there.
For one thing, it got me out of the apartment into a beautiful sunny day. It’s the perfect day for me : blue skies and sunshine withoutit being too hot.
IThat is ideal weathr chez moi. The outdoors, but with air comnditioning.
Speaking of sunshine, that actually came up during my appointment. My GP, Doctor Chao, mentiuoned how my symptoms might be due (at least in part) to a Vitamin D deficiency. I mentioned that I don’t exactly get a lot of sun, and he said he didn’t think anyone did any more.
And that opened up a whole thing in my mind because he’s right, and that means most people are walking around Vitamin D deficient, and iwhat does that mean for society?
According to the great god Google, the main symptoms of vitamin D deficiency are weak bone and muscles. Yikes.
Dunnoi what that has to do with my mental fog, but whatever. I trust my doctor knows what is is talking about.
The easiest solution would be for me to start drinking milk a lot. Milk had both calcium and the vitamin D I need to use it. But meh.
Milk tastes good but it’s kind of a hassle because you have to be sure to use it all before it spoils, so you have to make a guess as to how much to buy at a time, and then it becomes this whole thing.
Besides, I haven’t been a mild drinker in so long that I bet it would make me sick.
Anyhow, back to the doctor’s office. I told him about how I haven;t toiuched the CPAP machine in years and why, and he didn’t seem to know what to think of that. I can’t uimagine I am the first patient to ever decide that CPAP was not for them, but he did not seem to know what to say.
I guess he didn’t expect it from me for some reason.
Anyhow, I then went on toi tell him about my growing issues with memory and other cognoitive functuions. I told him ghow I kept forgetting things and how I felt like the dog in my mind was getting thicker and that I was worfried that sleep apnea is making Swiss cheese out of my brain.
Not in those words, of course. He speaks perfect English but it;s not his native tongue and so I try not to throw too much verbal razzle dazzle at him.
He, of course, immediately wanted a whole bunch of tests done on me, and that is when I really shined because I told him quite firmly that the reason I never get the lab work done is fasting – I can’t.
If I go too long without food, I could die, Blood sugar crash,. Boom. Bad way to go.
And the kicker is that whatever test it was that demanded a 10 hour (!) fast from me, oit had nothing to do with my diabetes. The diabetes one is called a hemoglobin A1C test and it works my taking a lot of blood cells, all of which were created at different times and therefore have different blood sugar levels encoded into them, and averages them out to get a picture of how my whole blood sugar scene is going down.
So fuck whatever this other test he was giving me. I have a fresh lab req with zero fasting on it and that means I will be going to the lab a block from here and giving them my pee and blood and about a week later we will have some idea of WTF.
I have pondered possible outcomes. It could be that everything comes back as A1 hunky dory on my testing, in which case shit woiuld have to escalate into some other form of testing, undoubtedly unpleasant.
So on that level, I would prefer the tests to come back with what is wrong clearly spelled out in numbers.
The worst case scenario would be that everything comes back A OK and there is nothing to indicate anything is wrong with me whatsoever so I am stuck knowing it is “all in my head”.
Well, actually, the worst case scenario would be finding out I had cancer so bad it was metastitizing to other people. but that’s hardly likely.
Finding out there was nothing physically wrong with me would be depressing, but it would still be something I could work with. It would simply mean that I needed to talk about it in therapy (something I plan to do tomorrow anyhow) and work on my psychological issues if I ever want to free my mind of this fucking fog.
It might be that the fog is there because of that numbing effect of depression I have spoken about. In response to emotional trauma, the brain produced a numbing agent in order to protect itself while it heals.
But some things don’t heal. And the numbing agent never goes away. And further trauma also never heal because too much of the brain is too numb to deal with them.
And voila, you’ve got yourself a depressive.
So it might be that my mental fog has gotten thicker and stickier because I am trying to deal with some very heavy shit in my mind and therefore numbing agent production has stepped up to compensate.
I have decades of suppressed anger and bitterness to process and the process ain’t gonna be pretty. I have little experience regulating rage and right now I feel like I have a particularly sarcastic version of The Hulk inside me that wants to verbally lash out at anything that pisses me off and it is going to take a while to integrate that part of me into my psyche in a balanced way.
So I am feeling quite cranky. And that’s new for me.
Guess I will have to learn to deal with it like a normal person.
What an utterly bizarre idea.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.