Thursday, March 26, 2009

I'm Going To Regret This ...

I should have taken an Ambien or at least some Benedryl.

But apparently I'm angsting about my cardiac testing tomorrow ... er, later this morning. And I'm not sleeping, although I should be.

I'm not worried there's anything wrong with my heart, although when my chest pain is bad enough, I do always wonder if I'd be able to tell if I really did have a heart attack.

So, when I saw the cardiologist, he told me he was going to order an echocardiogram just to make sure there was no inflammation in my heart that had developed since my last echo in July 2007. With both my SED rate and my CRP elevated, it's clear I have inflammation somewhere, and he felt it had been long enough since my last echo to be worthwhile looking at it to be sure it hasn't been affected.

But by the time he sent a letter to my internist, he apparently changed his mind and decided he was going to order a stress test and a tilt-table test. The latter will rule out POTS, which I thought he had already ruled out during my office visit.

The stress test, done the traditional way on a treadmill, will let him see what's happening when my heart rate goes up during exertion. They think it's probably not a serious problem, but this will tell him more than the little finger monitors I've worn while walking in hallways.

And apparently no echo. But I'll be asking him about that when I see him.

Anyway, I'm not worried so much about the results of the test so much as whether the end result will be major exhaustion, which always causes me to flare. And since I really don't feel like I'm recovered from my flare that started in mid February, I'm dreading the effect it will have on me.

On the upside, I've got nothing scheduled next week other than an acupuncture appointment, so if I spend it all in bed, I won't have a lot of stuff that needs rescheduling.

Think positive, right? Maybe I'll find out that the forced exercise on the treadmill makes me feel better rather than worse. That would be nice ...

Meanwhile, I spoke to my internist on Tuesday about my brain MRI. She's mailing me a copy of the radiologist's report, and then I'll have more detail including proper medical terminology.

Essentially, she said the radiologist didn't see anything that screamed MS lesion. So that's good, right? However, there were two bright spots in my right frontal lobe that it's not clear what, if any, effect they're having on me. She said it could be a sign of vasculitis, but she didn't think so because when they compared it to my October 2007 scan, it appeared one of the spots may have been present then. She said that if it were vasculitis, it would have grown much more in the past two years than it had. But she said that really, I need to talk to the neurologist, who I see on April 20 to discuss what she sees in the scans and what she thinks it all means.

The radiologist also commented on my sinuses, which apparently have a major thickening of the mucosal lining ... or something like that. Apparently, I had a little bit of it back in 2007 in one set of sinuses, but now it's much, much worse and in three sets of sinuses. My internist called my ENT to discuss it (they're in the same practice), and he asked her why he hadn't done sinus surgery on me yet. (Gee, maybe because I don't really want it, and it hasn't been a priority over the past two years of my being sick?) She says I need to go see him, and I'm sure I will eventually consider dealing with it. But right now? Anyway, I'm going to try a neti pot first. After all, Dr. Oz talked about them on Oprah a year or so ago! Can't hurt, and it's a lot cheaper than surgery. So many of my friends swear by them.

And that's the news ...

2 comments:

Just Jenn said...

Neti-pots are great, hope you find that it works for you! (And that you feel better instead of worse from the exercise).

Aviva said...

Thanks, Jenn!!