bethlet.net

Follow-up doctor's appointment

Right, so as you may nor may not know, I had a blood test on Tuesday morning for this hand pain thing. They said call in a week to get results, blah blah blah. I get a call on Wednesday morning from the doctor's office saying that the doctor wants me to make an appointment to check in with him. Note that this isn't my normal doctor I've been seeing. This fact is incidental - my GP didn't have an appointment available when I first decided to look into this pain - but important. My normal GP has never given the slightest inclination of giving a monkey's about either James's or my health. She's nice enough, don't get my wrong, but she's just sort of hands off.

So I made an appointment to see Dr. Idowu (it took me ages to figure out how to pronounce his name, but it's basically "I do" with the stress on the I). The appointment was today.

He didn't have all the blood test results back - namely, he didn't have the rheumatoid factor test back, which is the important one - but he had some. Everything was very normal (woo!) except for the ESR test, which was high. He explained vaguely that this indicated inflamation.

I looked it up, as I am wont to do, and it does indeed indicate inflamation, which is useful when diagnosing and monitoring, yep, rheumatoid arthritis.

When I explained to Dr. Idowu that my paternal grandmother and her sister both had rheumatoid arthritis, he noted that down and said that if my RF was high, he'd refer me to a rheumatologist because I am a "strong candidate" for rheumatoid arthritis.

The use of the word candidate amused me, here. It's like I'm running for office or something. Applying for a job. Because, this is just that desirable. :P

The good thing that came out of this all is that I have some stronger meds. The ibuprofen was working, but not working enough, and I was still being annoyed by stupid low-grade finger pain. Which sucks especially because I'm busy with work.

Profile

Archives

Flickr