New GP – Dr. B.

Just a quick post. Saw a new GP today, Dr. B. She’s a doctor of osteopathic medicine.

Got a diagnosis of moderate depression, which she thinks is causing my fatigue (and I think my fatigue is causing)- so prescribed 30 min. of daily exercise (and apparently my walking around my giant campus and walking the dog don’t count), no more caffeine, going to bed and waking up at set times, and no naps.
…I don’t think I can do all that… caffeine and flexible (usually long) hours are the lifeblood of graduate students after all! Plus more moving while in pain…
Any advice?

She’s also got me started on two weeks of omperazole to see if that helps my GI pain. We’ll see, but I’m not confident it will do anything.

No cyst, scheduling, and school starting.

Last week I got the call from my GYN’s nurse “Dr. H has looked over your ultrasound and there is no cyst. If you’re still having pain you can come in on Thursday.”

Well yes, I was (and am) still having fairly prominent pain, so I agreed to the visit. On Thursday I arrived promptly at 10:30 after rearranging my work schedule and the fiance’s work schedule to accommodate for the visit; when I got there I was met with a very confused receptionist and “Dr. H is at our other location… You’re not on the schedule.”

So I explained how the appointment was set up and she goes looking through the records , only to find a copy of my ultrasound results with a note scribbled on the bottom that I have an appointment for Thursday, but Thursday is crossed out and Wednesday is written above it. Which is, of course, news to me. So the receptionist where I am calls up the receptionist at the other location to get a hold of the nurse. Turns out the nurse realized they would be at the other location and had the second location receptionist call me and leave a message- but my phone updated the OS while she called so I never got it. Okay, so a new appointment is squeezed in for Friday (the next day) at 3:45. Thank goodness we are graduate students and work such flexible additional jobs and can rearrange our schedules quickly and easily.

So Friday  I go to the work in the morning and feel like crap. Absolutely no energy, have to focus on breathing, can’t think, etc. At 3:20, A (fiance) picks me up and drops me off at the clinic; then around 4:15 my appointment gets started. My BP was 100/50 so that explains at least partially the difficulty breathing. We go through the exam and find nothing, then have a nice chat about my symptoms and how the fatigue, especially, is really interfering with my ability to function- especially as a graduate student. Dr. H orders some blood work and switches my pills up to 3o mg Seasonale (since I was spotty everyday for the three months on BeYaz, and still in pain).

Today I got my blood work results. I’m not anemic, my thyroid hormones look normal, and I have a low white count but everything else looks normal. Follow up blood work in 6 weeks to check on the white cells. Since the blood work didn’t find anything she is referring me to a Doctorate of Osteopathy Family Doctor; she’s having my records and a letter regarding my situation faxed over today so hopefully I will hear from them soon and can schedule an appointment.

I have the 5 hour written portion of my Qualifying Exam coming up on February 7th and at this point not only am I unprepared because I have been too exhausted to read and comprehend the papers, but I am not confident that I will have the energy to sit up for 5 hours let alone think and write for 5 hours. Plus, there has been lots of wedding drama lately thanks to the school football schedule changing. And to top everything off, I started my period right in time for classes to start, and lost 120 mL of blood in the first 48 hours.

Follow-up: Cysts and Pills

The ultrasound yesterday was at the GYN instead of the Imaging Center where I usually go- it was much less thorough and only TV instead of both abdominal and TV. While I hate the pain of ultrasounds, I at least appreciate when they are thorough enough to really see what is going on…
One thing I did like was the screen set up directly across from the bench so I could watch what was going on. Makes sense to have a monitor accessible if you are usually doing ultrasounds on pregnant people- of course they want to see. I love watching ultrasounds, and usually request a copy of my ultrasound images following the procedure (I didn’t this time), so it was a nice feature. However, since I do know what I am looking at… I found things to be concerning. My uterus looks normal as always, same endometrium, same cervix, and left ovary always has a few (4-6) follicles… so that was all typical. There was even the typical shooting pain that comes with the position they have to put the probe in to look at my right ovary. But right ovary came up with no big clear cyst like last time. In fact the tech had to put the doppler on to even find the ovary. I couldn’t easily differentiate if there was an endometrioma (i.e., blood filled cyst).

My GYN is actually out of town until Monday, and since it isn’t a big, obvious, follicular cyst I’m sure her nurse (who ordered the ultrasound for me) won’t actually give me any indication of what is going on. If it is an endometrioma, that sucks, but I am okay with knowing that there is indeed a cyst pressing on things and causing this pain. If it isn’t a cyst… why does it hurt like this again? What else could be going on? And if it isn’t a cyst, is my doctor just going to blow off this pain? Will she order more imaging to try to see what is actually going on? Will she try to push Depo again? Will she suggest I look into surgical options, or refer me to a gastrointestinal specialist?

Monday seems so far away.

Cysts and pills

I think my cyst on my right ovary is returning. I have an ultrasound in about two hours to get a look at it, which of course is something I am dreading. I don’t mind abdominal ultrasounds- the pressure isn’t my favorite thing in the world but it isn’t bad; the transvaginal ultrasounds on the other hand are excruciating. Not all of is horrible, but there are certain positions they must place the probe in to visualize everything and some of those positions make me want to cry. I took a hydrocodine to help cope with the current pain and to hopefully mitigate some of the searing pain that comes with the TV.

I don’t know what we’ll do if the cyst has returned. I’m 5 months in on the BeYaz- currently 1/2 way through my last pack of this 3 month rotation (I only did 2 months the first time since I had already been on a month of NorQD). I got the first cyst on the NorQD, but it regressed to the point it no longer felt like appendicitis when I switched over to the BeYaz. I don’t really have many other options to switch to from the BeYaz if there is a cyst again. And I am NOT, NOT, NOT doing the Depo shot.

I hate this. I hate endo.