Here is the short version of the appointment: I am in perfect health and there is no diagnosis (which I expected).  There is no treatment, not even for symptom management (which I did not).

Here is the short version of the rest of my day: lots of blubbering and despair.

The happy ending is that I did consult a different doctor, and he says there are indeed a few things to try, which he figures my GP just wouldn’t have known about.

It was a bad appointment.  I was made to wait an hour past my time to get in, and when I did, the whole meeting took less than five minutes.  After telling me there are no treatments at all, which let me tell you, was incredibly awful and hopelessness-inducing, she then went on to give me the speech about how if she doesn’t know the cause of the problem, it can’t be treated, and medical science doesn’t know everything.  This is irritating because a) I already know the latter part, duh, and b) the first clause isn’t even true.  Medicine treats things which have an unknown etiology all the time.  Schizophrenia and depression come to mind as a couple examples but there are scads more.  The field of medicine advances largely through clinical work, where doctors just try stuff out and see if it works, not through research, where a bunch of scientists come up with something and then gift it to the front line docs.  This is not a first-principles-first sort of process - quite the opposite.  Induction, not deduction.  Her comment was largely designed to put me off and shut me up.  How annoying.

Anyway, at this point I will admit to doing something totally embarrassing, which was to start to cry in the office.  Honestly, this whole process has just been going on for so long and has taken on epic proportions in my life and to be told by my doctor that nothing can be done was devastating.  In addition to feeling crushed and scared I was feeling totally embarrassed, and all I managed to blubber out was an apology, then managed to choke out that the whole thing was just rather frightening.  At which point she prescribed me some sedatives to take at the next attack, and gave me a little talk about how we’d work on a solution together.

We need to unpack this a little so you can understand why this was intensely infuriating.  One, I have never once said anything about anxiety in relation to these attacks.  I don’t get anxious when I have them, I get pain.  Pain is uncomfortable and it can be scary but I’m not exactly hyperventilating over here.  So she’s prescribing not based on my presenting problems, and in fact she didn’t ask me about anxiety - what was going on there is she thinks my problem might be some sort of somatizing issue, and doping me up might resolve it.  This played right into my fear of that very thing, which okay, might be legitimate, but also managed to be deeply invalidating and insulting at the same time.  I just felt like she didn’t get it at all, didn’t get how terrible it is, how it entirely cripples and shuts down my life.  You can’t just say there’s no hope and send me away in under five minutes.

And what is this talk of finding a solution together?  Did she not just tell me, in no uncertain terms and repeated several times, that there are no treatments?  Which the fuck is it, there is no symptom relief or we’re working on a solution together?  What kind of solution, exactly, did she have in mind?  Either she was just spouting platitudes, which is retarded, or again she figures it’s emotional in origin.  The fact that I am at that very moment crying into my lap does nothing to help my case for saying it’s not a hysterical problem.  This appointment is the culmination of a year of uncertainty, fear, testing, and worry - after all that, to hear there is no hope, I imagine many people would break down.  This doesn’t mean I’m some sort of wandering womb hysteric.  And if she has some grand design to track my stress or emotional wellness or whatever, she is doing a shitty job of approaching it, because she didn’t ask me about any of those things.

Another possibility is it just kind of freaked her out that I fell apart, and she was trying to be reassuring.  Lesson one in therapy school is to not give false reassurance because people smell it a mile away and it tends to infuriate them.  Someone should give my doctor the head’s up.

Anyway, at this point, three minutes after her arrival, it was clear we had nothing more to talk about, so I left.  I was too choked up to really say much, I just accepted the script for sedatives, and collected my things and left.  On the way out, she says, brightly: “Have a nice weekend!”

I could have murdered her.  Kiss my ass, that’s what kind of fucking weekend I’m going to have.

Okay.  The good news is I now have rock solid proof that my brain and spine and nerve function is absolutely top notch, no problems at all.  I have written here several times “it’s not like I have a tumour” and that is designed to make it look like I’m not worried, most importantly to myself, but the truth is I have been really scared that there’s something growing up there.  There isn’t.  I am intensely, intensely relieved.

I also know that my GP is not the final word on treatment.  Hence my consultation with someone different.  And lo, there is hope.  Also intensely relieving.  But I didn’t know that when I got out of the appointment - at that time I was just freaking out, calling my husband and speaking in monosyllables because, I don’t know about you, but I can’t talk and cry at the same time.  It was actually pretty pathetic.  I’m embarrassed at how poorly I handled the whole thing - emotional breakdown, taking the patronizing doctor talk without challenge, just being a spaz.  Ugh.

Anyway, that’s all done with now.  Today I plan to finish my novel and try to just unwind a bit, you know?  Yesterday was an emotional wringer.  I’m wrung out.

I need a beer.

Seriously.  I am a frazzled mess.  Who the fuck calls in sick on the day when my Entire Fucking Life Forever And Ever is being decided?  Or rather, announced.  Shit.  You know what I mean.

Here are things I am good at coping with:

-A lack of clean socks.  Steal some of Husband’s.

-No food in the house.  Go to Subway.

-It’s too cold out.  Get in the tub.

-I am trapped in a leg hold trap in the forest.  Chew off own leg and hop back to town.

Here are things I absolutely cannot cope with:

-FURTHER DELAYS IN FINDING OUT WHAT MY DIAGNOSIS IS.

I am going batshit crazy sitting around the house all day, but also recognize I haven’t the brain capacity to successfully tie my own shoes nevermind venture forth into the world in search of distraction.  If you were here, you might be amused by the hummingbird-like manner in which I have been starting, losing track of, and abandoning activities all day long.  I waffle between irritation, frustration, weepiness, listlessness, and a urge to just get it all over with the jump off the fucking patio.  So far I have failed to read, fold laundry, do dishes, nap, eat, and even watch TV.  You know you are in a hard way when you can’t even achieve TV watching.

Honestly.  I am sure I am making a much bigger deal out of this than is strictly required - after all, as previously discussed, I’m sure I haven’t got any tumours or cancers or other actually serious problems.  In fact I was just telling Husband, over crepes which were lovingly hand warmed by our slaves who then fed us morsels with their pristine fingertips, how nice it is to live in utter luxury as we do.  In between attending gala balls and deciding which colour of marble to install in our eleven bathrooms we really aren’t faced with much in the way of hardship.  Yet I suppose all of us are entitled to the occasional freak out.  Today is my turn.

My god, I’m not even making sense any more.  Someone kill me.

This morning I was supposed to go to my doctor and hear the final word on just what the hell is wrong with me (I know, I know, it’s sure to be a huge list).  What actually happened was the clinic called to cancel my appointment because my doctor is sick.

If anybody needs me today, I’ll be at home wringing my hands and staring miserably into the middle distance.

I have allergies, and this morning I woke up with Terrible, Awful sinus pressure.  I just want to say that it is incredibly, deeply unfair to have to suffer through months of headaches and sinus pain and itchy eyes just because there happen to be trees on the planet.  I mean, come on!  It’s actually sort of pathetic - hay fever, I mean. You’d think my body could come up with something better to do to me.

Oh wait, it did.  This Tuesday I go for the results of months of testing (which culminated in the never-to-be-forgotten three hour MRI) to see what my pesky nerves are getting up to.  However, I am pretty sure they’re going to tell me they don’t know.  The reason I think this is that my care has been handed back from the neurologist to my GP.  If you have something serious like MS or whatever, the neurologist keeps you.

Also, when I finally broke down and called the neurology clinic on Monday to see when my results would be available, it became clear that they’ve been available for a while, but no one bothered to call me.  So it can’t be anything too serious.  Right?  They call you if you have a brain tumour.  I’m sure they would call if my brains were about to leak out of my ears or something.

So what I expect to hear is this: “We have no idea what is wrong with you.  Your body is a special snowflake whose mysteries we cannot hope to unravel.  In the meanwhile, take these pills when you get an attack.”

Okay.  There was a time when that would have been a disaster.  I really wanted a diagnosis, because the uncertainty was killing me.  I figured if there was a diagnosis, it would mean there were treatments - and, it would mean I’m not just crazy and somehow doing this to myself.

Now I realize that a diagnosis actually isn’t good at all, because the kicker of neurological diseases is almost all of them can’t be fixed.  And, if I have something significant enough to have been defined in the medical literature as A Disease, it’s probably pretty bad, right?  So I don’t want a diagnosis now.  I’ve learned more about this stuff and apparently it’s not uncommon for nervy stuff to stay mysterious in origin, it probably doesn’t mean I am crazy, and even without a formal diagnosis, there are lots of different medications to try to treat the symptoms.

So I’m all ready for the no-diagnosis diagnosis.  I’m a little nervous about the medication because a doctor I know figures there’s one certain pill I have a very good chance of being prescribed, and one of its side effects is “cognitive blunting.”  I asked, “So, like, I have a little trouble focusing or something?  I forget where I left my keys, that kind of thing?”  And he said, “No, like you can’t count backwards from ten.”

And though he went on to explain this particular side effect is rare and only happens in chronic users, I will be very suspicious of that med if I get it.  Quick - would you rather be in pain or stupid?  It’s actually a pretty tough call!  The pain is, no question, terrible.  But so would being stupid, ya know?  I don’t know.  Obviously I have been prescribed nothing yet and know nothing yet, I’m just ruminating over here.  As you might guess I’m pretty nervous about this appointment on Tuesday.

So until then I will stuff my traitorous body with antihistamines and try to keep my imagination reined in.

I live right near Science World here in Vancouver.  For those who don’t know anything about this city, my neighbourhood should conjure up images of water, parks, and nice yuppie families strolling with babies through one on the edge of the other.  Well, the west side of my block is like this.  The east side is full of junkies and panhandlers, but we’ll let that go for today.  Anyway, Vancouverites will know this.  What they might not know is the Horrible Truth about the park across the street from me: it’s where the dragon boaters go.

I don’t know what a dragon boat is.  It looks like a big canoe with too many rowers to me but what do I know?  Also, it appears to be powered entirely by fear and shouting, because each dragon boat has some loud mouthed shouter in it, screaming at the line of rowers, and they all furiously row, I assume to prevent the shouter from peeling their skins off like a banana and rubbing salt on what’s left over.  It’s the only thing that explains the violence and energy that goes into the rowing.

Did I mention the shouter?  Did I mention I can hear those fuckers in my bedroom at the crack of fucking dawn?  Did I mention I don’t like being shouted at at the crack of fucking dawn?

Especially when I am in the midst of a nerve attack, my first in several months.  It came on last night while out with friends (Lara, welcome to the strange world of BV where you find out more about me from the blog than from real life).  A group of us ladies hit a bar and swapped stitches stories while drinking - and by around ten I could tell my crazy nerves were getting agitated (for those new here: I have some kind of thus far undiagnosed problem with neuropathic pain).  I hung on for an hour or so but realized I needed to get home pretty soon so I could get the horrible, irritating clothes off my body and lie around in extreme discomfort for the rest of the night.  And on until it abated.

Plus I have a paper to finish today that is due tomorrow.  Which seemed like the better reason for leaving to put forward, since I didn’t know everyone there and didn’t want to be all, “Hey new people I just met, I really feel like ripping my clothes off, so I have to go home now.”  Anyway, I said goodnight and came home, to do exactly as planned: try not to move and just be miserable most of the night.  Finally around three I fell asleep, and this is great because there is no pain in sleep, or at least there wasn’t, until some mother fucking piece of shit dragon boat shouter started up and woke me.  May the fleas of a thousand camels infest their nether regions.

Now I’m up, preparing to dig into the paper, and feeling seriously crabby about how shitty I feel (and wouldn’t be, if I was still sleeping).  Let’s hope it improves enough for me to go to Mission tonight for a game I’m playing out there.