Bad news on the health front this week

You know how they say things come in threes? Well, I think I’m experiencing that phenomenon this week. Medically speaking it hasn’t been a very good week. I could sure use my Friends and Family around me this week!

On Wednesday I spent about four hours in the hospital seeing two different doctors and having a painful test done, and the week prior to that I had a follow test done on another part of my body that I just got the results of on Friday and the news isn’t good.

Let’s see .. where do I start? I’m falling apart? LOL Yeah, well that’s about the truth of it.

Ok to make this short and sweet:

1. I’ve always had bad knees but last winter and even prior to last winter my knees were just aching and even giving out on me on the stairs. I fell a few times – badly. I finally convinced my family doctor to take it seriously and had xrays and MRIs in June and it looked like I had osteoarthritis in my right knee. Well one of the doctors that I saw on Wednesday was an Orthopedic surgeon and I don’t have osteoarthritis yet (I probably will soon). My kneecaps on both legs are not tracking correctly because my lower legs aren’t formed right (tibia extortia – don’t worry they look fairly normal) so my knee caps are basically grinding on bone! Ow. The bad news is that surgery does not have good results in correcting this problem so I’m out of luck. The doctor said I’ll have good days and bad days and that’s pretty much what I’ve been experiencing and as we’re about to get into cold weather soon I expect I’ll be in more pain soon.

2. In April I noticed my voice was getting hoarse. I thought it was maybe due to a virus or something but May came along and my voice was getting worse. Sometimes I couldn’t rely on it at all. I’d never had any trouble with my voice in the past at all .. not even when I’d get a sore throat – no laryngitis or anything ever. By the time June came along and I’d have days where I could barely talk I knew something was severely wrong so I told my doctor I wanted to see an Ear Nose and Throat specialist. The problem … even in a huge city like Toronto there aren’t very many good ENT doctors and when my appointment was booked it was booked for December!

Anyway … I managed to get an appointment to see the specialist in the outpatient department of the hospital this past Wednesday – as long as I could make it there before 3 pm. I made it at 2:50 pm … my other doctor had been running behind! I told the doctor the symptoms that I’d been having and of course the first question he asked was if I was a smoker and I was happy to tell him that I quit over 11 months ago. He was happy to hear that. He then asked if I had a lot of gastric reflux. I told him that I had some occasionally, but that when I was smoking it had truly been a terrible problem – but once I quit it stopped for the most part too. He wasn’t all that surprised to hear that either. So .. he decided to put a tiny camera down my nose and throat to see my voice box – mainly to see if there was any damage like a paralyzed vocal cord or perhaps damage from gastric reflux. He didn’t see any damage at all.

So … he believes that I have a rare condition that causes weakening vocal muscles which causes people to have a weak voice. He said that it usually doesn’t cause people to totally lose their voice and sometimes it only lasts for a short while and their voice comes back completely normal again and other times it just doesn’t. So he’s sending me to a vocal specialist in another hospital. I guess he almost never refers people to other doctors because his staff was quite surprised at the referral.

The bottom line is that I’m losing my voice and I don’t know if it will ever return to normal. Sometimes I can barely talk. It’s terrible and kind of scary. The only good thing about it is that it might be a way for me to talk my husband into getting an iPad … I can carry it around and use it as a writing tool when my voice isn’t working right??? Uh huh. Yeah that might work.

3. The last bit of bad medical news might be the scariest. A little over a month ago I found a lump in my right breast. Now I’ve had a lump in my breast before and I’ve had the lump removed … it was benign – that was back in 1992. Hopefully this turns out to be benign too.

About three weeks ago I went in for mammograms and the person doing my mammograms had me sit and wait while she tried to find the radiologist to have a look at the pictures right away. I know this technologist and I can tell my the way she spent 45 minutes running around trying to find the radiologist and then trying to get me an ultrasound right then and there that she saw something in the mammogram but of course she couldn’t and wouldn’t say that to me. Ultrasound was totally booked up and believe it or not I had to wait two weeks for a follow up ultrasound.

When I had the ultrasound of my right breast the woman – someone I didn’t know (remember I’m a nurse and I’m on medical leave at the hospital so I know most everyone!) spent 15 minutes going over about two inches of my breast. I watched the ultrasound and she was repeatedly measuring something that looked like a small tumor (adenoma) to me.

On Friday my doctors office left a message on my answering machine while I was out stating that they wanted to do a follow up ultrasound in about two months. I tried calling back but the office had already called … but I know that there’s something there and if they want to ultrasound again in a few months they want to make sure whatever they found isn’t growing or if it is that it’s growing slowly … grrr … just take the darn thing out like they did in the early 90’s! Breast Cancer runs in my family!

Anyway you can bet I’ll be on the phone to my doctors office on Monday trying to get more answers. I don’t like this at all. Especially when I know my body likes to grow tumors. I already had a precancerous tumor in my thyroid removed in the 90’s as well and now I have more tumors in what’s left of my thyroid. I also have a tumor in my leg, and now I’m pretty sure one in my breast … Not good.