Health Conversations

Last night I went out to dinner and had a really good, honest conversation with my parents about health things. It really needed to happen. My mom surprised me (in a good way) by ackwnowledging from the start that working a standard job may not be something that I can do. My dad asked me what I'm going to do when his insurance stops covering me in a little over a year, and I told him that I have no idea what my options even are. He agreed to help me figure it out once I'm not quite so stressed out and busy, which would really help me and possibly remove a big chunk of worry that I've had in the back of my mind for awhile. We were also talking about moving to Canada, which started out a joke but ended up as a pretty serious discussion. My mom has been fighting our insurance over her various treatments for things and my dad just got finished reading a book about how much better healthcare is in every other industrialized country, so I guess it wasn't really surprising. Just the thought that they would actually consider moving out of the country to help me is amazing. Wow. So now we're back to being on the same page again, which is really nice.

Today we all went to my ENT so that he could look over my CAT scan. He took one look at each page and told me that surgery won't help me, which is a huge relief. My sinuses are normal and my deviated septum isn't actually blocking anything in. The most suprising thing was that he could tell that what I've been catching aren't actually sinus infections. He questioned me on my symptoms again and said that it sounds like a virus, not a bacterial infection, so that's why the antibiotics were just making me worse. He gave me some tips on how to change my sinus rinse routine so that it might help (can you believe I never thought to really clean the thing?) and suggested I use Claritin or Zyrtec, both of which I've taken in the past without issues. I don't need to go back to him, and I can try to fix this with simple things that don't involve surgery. Thank god.

So that turned out much better than I thought it would. I really appreciate the fact that he wasn't going to do a surgery that I didn't need. And I even get to keep my pretty inside-my-head pictures for posterity. Muahahaha.