Rethink Every Once In A While

I went to the doctor a couple of days ago to follow up on my bad bronchitis a few months ago.

I was diagnosed with asthma when I was a teenager. I get bronchitis a lot. There was a period of time when I was in college where I was getting it twice a year. When I moved to Southern California it got better and I only seemed to have trouble about every two or three years. Then last year I got the worst bronchitis I'd ever had. I coughed so hard I tore two intercostals. They hurt for six months.

Then I got the flu/bronchitis again this year and something's got to change. I can't keep doing this every year.

So, I talked to the new doctor and said, "let's start at the beginning with the asthma diagnosis." They gave me a standard breathing analysis and we found that I have no impaired lung function.

What does that leave? Allergies. Very bad allergies.

This was a doctor who actually looked in my nose and saw how inflamed it all is in there.

You're wondering what this had to do with my hysterectomy.

Not much.

Except to make the point that sometimes you need to go back and rethink stuff from top to bottom.

Some women go through terrible bleeding every month and find themselves on the road to a hysterectomy when in reality their menstrual bleeding is only a symptom of a bleeding disorder like von Willebrand's disease.

This doctor sat down and rethought this problem from the beginning - what were my symptoms and were they really asthma or were they actually something else.

Now I have to clean up my house, get rid of the down comforter, and start taking my allergies pills. We'll be able to tell in a few months if it's making any difference.

Oh, and he's also going to give me a full workup on my next visit. I'm going to have my cholesterol tested and I'm going to try to drop 10 pounds (or convert those ten pounds of fat to muscle, I don't care which) to get back to where I was two years ago.

Posted by Elizabeth M. on March 24, 2005 7:56 PM