Like I Have Time For This?

 I would now like to crawl in bed and stay there until this week is finally over.

RegularDad’s working swing shift this week, which means he’s home in the mornings and early afternoons. I’m usually tired on swing weeks, because I just don’t sleep well at all when RegularDad’s not next to me. It’s just one of those things.

So, I’m tired. But because RegularDad was home during the days this week, I thought it would be a good idea to schedule some doctor appointments for myself, so I wouldn’t have to take the girls with me. I took them with me to my check-up last week, and they ended up bickering and kicking each other while I was trying to talk to the doctor, which made it difficult to really pay attention to the doctor because I kept having to intervene with my kids.

At that check-up, the doctor said I needed to see an ear specialist for that pounding sound, and he also said I needed to schedule some sort of thyroid scan because my blood work had come back showing a low thyroid. But then he said that the reason my thyroid was low was because it was too high and was going to burn out and then be too low. Or something. And he mentioned Graves disease, too. He didn’t say I have Graves disease. He just mentioned it a few times. (This was right around the time when the kids were kicking each other, so I’m not quite sure what exactly the doctor was talking about.) But he gave me a yellow piece of paper with “thyroid uptake scan” circled on it, and told me to schedule this test at the local hospital.

So I called the hospital and scheduled it, and the nurse told me I had to stay off of iodine for 5 days prior to this 2-day-long test that required me to take some sort of radiated pill and then keep returning the the hospital for multiple scans for 2 days. What a hassle. She said that as long as I didn’t eat anything with salt in it, I would be fine, and she said she would send me a list of foods to avoid and other instructions.

I waited for days for that list to arrive, and by this past Monday morning, I was utterly confused. I’d looked up iodine-free foods online and found out that avoiding salt didn’t mean squat when it comes to avoiding iodine. And that half the stuff I’d been eating, thinking it was okay, probably wasn’t. So I called them back and asked for clarification, and they told me not to eat any seafood and not to take any vitamins and I would be fine. The next day, the instruction sheet arrived and all it said was “no seafood, no vitamins” so I remained confused but stayed off the tuna.

Meanwhile, I went to see the ear-guy and talked to him about my tinnitus problems. He checked my ears and did a full hearing test and told me that he didn’t see anything. My hearing is perfect. My ears look fine. The pounding sound might indicate that I’ve got some sinus pressure building up, but then again it might not. He’s not sure. The only thing to do at this point is to wait for the noise to come back and then use a nose spray to see if that makes the noise stop. Or we could do a full MRI to see if I’ve got an aneurysm developing anywhere. But chances are, it’s not an aneurysm, so let’s just wait and see.

Those are my choices, basically: sinus pressure or aneurysm. Nice. Really nice.

God, I love doctors.

So, with that appointment taken care of yesterday morning, I rushed back home to take the kids to their horsemanship clinic. You can read about how THAT went here. Or you can just take my word for it when I say that it was a small stint in horsemanship-hell that we will not be repeating.

So this morning it was time for me to go to the hospital for my thyroid scan. I had to fast 2 hours prior to the test, so I got up super early just so I could have a cup of tea beforehand. My 4-year-old woke up when she heard me out in the kitchen, and she busied herself getting all her pillows and blankets off her bed and dragging them quietly out to the livingroom so as not to wake her sister. This, of course, sounded like a herd of elephants stampeding through the hallway so her sister did indeed wake up and by the time I got out of the shower, puzzle pieces were already stuck in toys they shouldn’t be stuck in, the kids had had one argument, and RegularDad was desperately trying to catch a few more minutes of sleep. Just your basic, average morning here.

I rushed out the door with my purse, my calendar where I was keeping all my paperwork, and a book to read, and drove over to the hospital, and by some miracle, I arrived at 8:45 am. Right on time. I went up to the registration desk to check in and the lady asked me for my yellow order slip.

Which was not in my calendar.

I searched and searched. But no. Not there. I asked her if I could bring it in later on when I returned for the scans. She shook her head and said they can’t let you in without the order slip. She suggested I call my doctor’s office and have them fax a copy and showed me a phone to use. But their line was busy constantly. I redialed it for about 10 minutes straight and never got through. So, really on the verge of tears now, I told the lady I’d have to reschedule the test and left.

I came back home and found the yellow paper buried under a pile of stuff on the desk in the living room. Then I poured myself a cup of coffee and went upstairs to the attic which RegularDad has kindly spent the week cleaning out and moving my old rolltop desk and some new shelving into so that I can have an office again. A room to myself again. A place for me and my books and my soothing warm drinks. (Because that’s the kind of guy he is, you know. The kind who will do whatever it takes to make my world nice and wonderful all while I’m running around crazy with over-scheduling problems that I’ve created for myself. Is it any wonder I can’t sleep without him next to me?)

I came up here and sat down and cried a bit and now I’m gonna shake it off and try to salvage something out of this week.

Like maybe some food with salt on it. Or dinner at Red Lobster this weekend. That thyroid thing can wait. I think I’ve had enough of medical things for a while.