There’s nothing more self-indulgent and presumptuous than a blogger that continually apologizes for lapses in posting regular content, but here I go again.
As I’ve been routinely lamenting in myriad posts over the past couple of months, I’ve had a lot on the burner, so to speak, and my preferred schedule of regularly updating this stupid blog has taken a bit of a hit as a result. Adding insult to injury, I’ve also blithely dropped a couple of vague hints about certain aspects of my silly life that prompted a few people to be genuinely concerned. I assure you, that concern is sincerely appreciated but ultimately unnecessary, as it turns out.
I should preface this laborious saga by saying I’ve probably never been a model patient. For more years than is advisable, I took a “don’t fix what ain’t broke” approach to my health. I entirely neglected to visit my personal doctor, not even for regular check-ups. I felt fine, so why bother, right? A couple of years back, however, I was experiencing an issue so minor that I don’t even recall what it was, but figured it warranted a proper doctor’s explanation, so I tried to make an appointment with my primary care physician, … only to find out that he’d passed away about two or three years earlier. Oops.
From there, I started going to see this new doctor recommended to me by my wife’s obstetrician. Dr. K is about my age and has a nice, relaxed manner. For whatever reason, I find it immensely rewarding to make him laugh, as that seems to diffuse any anxiety I might be experiencing when needing to consult his services. I figure, if he’s laughing, nothing can be so dire, right?
In any case, after signing up with Dr. K, I resumed my regular routine of basically ignoring whatever health problems I might have been experiencing until absolutely necessary. I carried on with that until my advancing age and its accompanying rigors started meddling with my unsustainable idyll.
Prior to the pandemic, as recounted in these action-packed posts, the only real concerns Dr. K had were getting me to cut back on the beer and ensuring that I get around to getting a long-put-off colonoscopy. I was finally ready to undertake that latter task until COVID-19 came and turned our collective lives into a b-grade disaster movie with no ending.
Last year, I finally did take care of that particular issue, only to be breezily informed by my disarmingly dispassionate gastroenterologist that I needed to have another one only a year later. That’ll happen this coming June. But, that’s not what this post is about (you're welcome).
As ominously invoked in this comparable post of a few weeks back, over the course of the last several months, I’ve been struck by a couple of mysterious, recurring symptoms that revealed themselves in manners both inexplicable and worrying. Now, as a gent in his mid-50’s, while it is perfectly reasonable to expect an incremental degree of physical atrophy in multiple departments, I had these two strange conditions sprout up perfectly out of the blue, and both gave me a considerable amount of alarm.
The first problem was … the vision thing (with strenuous apologies to the Sisters of Mercy). It was a phenomenon I’d experienced sporadically throughout my life, but more recently, it had suddenly started happening quite often. Essentially, the experience unfolds as follows. My field of vision becomes suddenly obstructed by what seems like just another small “floater,” only this floater pulses and grows. Gradually, the floater impedes my ability to see clearly as it expands. It distorts my ability to focus, read or even pinpoint depth as it gradually — over the course of about 30 minutes — takes over the entire vista of my sight. And then, … it just stops.
That sound pretty scary, right? Well, lemme tell you, … it is.
As such, after a succession of these instances — usually one a day over a set of three or four days — I got my wife’s trusted eye doctor on the phone and made an appointment with all haste. A day or so later, I was in his office doing my best to describe what I just tried to explain above. The whole thing sounded so idiotic coming out of my mouth that I was relatively certain he was going to shrug and tell me to get over it. “Yes, I know exactly what that is,” came his surprising response, “but the problem isn’t an ocular one … it’s a neurological one.”
Oh…. great!
In swift order, he explained that these strange phenomena I was experiencing were called “visual auras,” which basically means electric waves that course across the visual cortex of my nonsense-addled brain. Evidently, they are most closely tethered to migraine headaches. Mysteriously, I wasn’t having any headaches — migraines or otherwise — just the auras, which were worrying enough. He basically told me that if they persist, I should go take it up with a neurologist. Oh joy.
I went back to Dr. K, my primary care physician, and gave him the whole schpiel. He said that, in light of the fact that I’d experienced them periodically throughout my life, it probably wasn’t anything to worry about, but to keep him informed if they persisted. He also told me to cut back on the beer, but then — he suggests that for every grievance I bring his way. That weary suggestion is usually met with an emphatic “why don’t you go fuck yourself?” We have a great rapport.
I didn’t get away that easily, though. After checking my vitals, he deduced that it was apparently high time to put me on blood pressure meds. A tiny white pill every morning. Imagine my glee.
A couple of months after that, however, I had to check into my local urgent care facility to have them poke around in my ear, as it was feeling prohibitively clogged up with viscous, waxy goo. Again, you’re welcome. They ended up giving me some frankly ineffective drops for it, but not before unsolicitedly checking my blood pressure, and coming up with a number they deemed “too high.” I relayed this fun bit of intel back to Dr. K, who wasted no time in adding another little pill to my morning blood pressure regimen. A little blue one, this time.
Concurrent to the addition of the little blue pill to my life came a completely new and foreign sensation. They started off in periodic bursts that swiftly increased in frequency. I started feeling the blood rushing in my feet pretty much all the time. Not tingling or numbness, mind you, which is a different thing entirely, but the naggingly regular feeling of blood coursing through the veins in my feet. It didn’t hurt, but it was new, noticeable, different and woke me up at night. I asked myself, “what is this and why is this happening?”
Using my shoddy powers of deduction, I leapt to the seemingly obvious (to me) conclusion that this new issue had be the result of that new little blue pill, right? I mean, these sensations started in tandem with my daily ingestion of the drug. It must have been a side-effect, I figured.
As it happened, this was all going on during a super busy and not-just-a-little stressful period at my office, wherein my attrition-battered department was responsible for jump-starting a series of important initiatives that had been dormant since the start of the pandemic. I honestly cannot recall a chapter wherein we were all so completely besieged and flying on fumes to get these projects done. The result of this was that I didn’t get around to getting back in touch with good ol’ Dr. K for about three or four weeks. So, basically, along with stressing my scalp silver over work demands, I was worrying myself sleepless about my mystery ailment for essentially a whole month before acting on it.
I shot an email to Dr. K saying that I’d assumed I was having odd side-effects from the little blue pill and described the blood-rushing-in-feet stuff and asked if it was cool that I went off it. He was reticent to concede that this new condition could possibly be the result of the pill, and preferred that I stick with it, as my blood pressure numbers were now at an all-time healthy low. Eventually, he said I could try it for week, but to also knock off the beer. “Up yours,” I responded, and started skipping the blue pill.
The week went by, but the blood-rushing persisted. Then, the visual auras came back in force — three in a row over the span of three days. I relayed this to Dr. K, who demanded I go back on the blue pill and to knock off all beer intake entirely, believing that the symptoms I was experiencing might be the amalgam of stress and alcohol fighting with the blood-pressure meds. Dutifully, I complied.
I went cold turkey on the beer, started investigating yoga and acupuncture options (hey, why not, right?) and did my best to settle my nerves (never an easy task, that). The visual auras stopped, but the blood-rushing-in-feet continued. At this stage, Dr. K said it was time to consult both a neurologist and a vascular specialist. I was not super enthused about the prospects, but figured actionable solutions would be better than trying to wish these things away.
Evidently, springtime in New York City is neurological grievance season, so finding an available appointment with one of the docs Dr. K had referred me to was like scoring box seats to friggin’ opening day at Yankee Stadium. The soonest I could schedule one was for some time in July, by which point the very problem I’m consulting them about may have gone away (here’s hoping).
I was, however, able to score an appointment with the vascular guy, a young gent who — after I was put through the paces of a veinous ultrasound probe — cheerily told me I had “the veins of a teenager.” While that certainly sounded promising, that didn’t explain the problem. He assured me that there was nothing …er….vascularly wrong with me. No clogging or blockages to be detected. He mentioned that maybe I should consult a podiatrist and/or I should invest in some deeply unfashionable compression socks. He had all faith that those would clear up the problem. I have yet to take the bait on that one, haunted by images of my late step-father’s peer group, walking around the beach out on Long Island in knee-high compression socks.
So, with that particular issue at least a little more illuminated, if not fully explained, the only items left to address on Dr. K’s to-do list remain the neurologist appointment about the visual auras, and, of course, my follow-up colonoscopy. The jury is still out on whether the visual auras are the result of undue stress, beer battling with the blood pressure meds, a combination of factors or something else entirely, but he said I could go back to having a couple of beers a week, which I, of course, have taken up with robust enthusiasm.
In any case, for the moment, at least, I’m not dying. I’m just aging.
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