walk into my vicious wine bucket

i know, i said that i would post a blog about the diagnostic center on friday and today is saturday, but my dad wanted to be an asshole and make my mom take me with her after the appointment to the uhaul place to get a trailer to move my brother's stuff to college. i can't really sit up for more than 20 minutes without being in a fucking lot of pain right now, and i was forced to sit up for 2 hours at the diagnostics center and then for 2 hours at the uhaul place and for 3 more hours in the car. so i was in a fucking lot of pain and unable to walk unassisted when i got back last night. and here's the fun part: my dad has a whole nother day to get the uhaul before they leave so it was totally unecessary to send my mom yesterday, she could've done it today! everybody call him a douchebag and i'll stop whining and move on.

my first thoughts about the appointment were positive. dr. pruett (notice i'm not giving her a demeaning pseudonym) was nice; she listened, she didn't accuse me of anything, she didn't interrupt, she asked questions, and she spent one and a half hours just going over my medical history, my chart, and my notes and asking other doctors about stuff. then she gave me a Quest, a mission, an assignment, if you will. its a Pee Quest. she wants me to collect all of my urine for 24 hours and bring it back to the lab. i thought "cool, she's looking at my cortisol levels" which is something a lot of women get when they're being checked out for endocrine disorders; it helps rule out something or another. i was pleased to become The Urinator because i thought she was on the right track. when i went to the lab to get the details of my Quest, they were all confused cause so few people get sent on such a daring mission. they had to make a lot of calls to places to get the instructions right and while they were making these calls i kept hearing the word "porphyrin". i thought that was weird; porphyrin is the red gummy stuff that comes out of a rat's eyes and nose when it has a respiratory infection or allergy. this morning i googled "24 hour urine collect porphyrin" and guess what i found? dr. pruett is testing my porphyrin level presumably because she thinks i have a neurological porphyria.

its kind of hard to decipher the information about it because most of the articles are written in medical jargon, but from what i understand porphyrins are enzymes that our bodies normally break down, but when they can't break them down and the levels build up it can cause problems. there are several different porphyrias (or diseases caused by porphyrin buildup) that a person can have. one only involves skin, so she probably doesn't think i have that unless she's a total idiot, the other one i found, the neurological porhyria, can cause damage to the liver, tingling and numbness in the hands and feet, difficulty moving, hallucinations, and a few other things. on the surface it looks like that might be what i have, but notice that this syndrome only explains about 20% of my symptoms and includes symptoms that i never had, for example, my back tingles, not my extremeties. and it completely disregards any symptoms that i had prior to late march. i've been acutely ill since february and i've had several undiagnosed problems since 1993 that seem to be related to my current ailment! so, she'd have to diagnose me with 2 or 3 or 4 major illnesses to make her porphyrin hypothesis hold water. like i said before: it is possible that i have 2 or 3 major illnesses that all came on at the exact same time, but not terribly probable. and i'm still rooting for endocrine disorder cause several endocrine disorders could explain all my symptoms. in summary: dr. pruett is nice, but she's an internist and i need an endocrinologist. i'll still go see her on the off chance that i have something else (either instead of or in addition to an endocrine disorder) because i've been wrong before and my medical smarts are only as good as freshman biology and google made them, but i believe any time spent pursuing only her opinion is a waste. i need to branch out.
for the present, i shall become The Urinator! collector of urine in the pursuit of... of... outlawing porphyria! i just hope she isn't one of those crazy "pet ailment" doctors who automatically believe that every patient they see will have a certain obscure illness that they want to unofficially specialize in and when the patient turns out to not have it, they just send the poor guy (or girl) home with a bottle of motrin. like that dude who x-rayed my chest when i had ovary pain.. wtf? lung puncture was never an issue! i think he was just a chest x-ray pervert. like some men like boobies, he liked to see what's under the boobies.