Date: Monday February 9th, 2004
I'm writing my journal entry on paper in class today, to be transcribed later (if I can make out my handwriting.) I've never been particularly good about paying attention in class. One of my favorite things about college has always been the ability to choose to skip classes if I want.
I remember this particular class in high school I would have loved to skip. It was trig and was taught by a woman who had just spent several years previously teaching grade school. This explained both her discipline technique of putting checkmarks on the board next to your name if you misbehaved, and her unfamiliarity with the subject matter. There were actually several times in the beginning of the semester when I had to help her figure out something she was trying to teach. I could usually go over the day's lesson in the book in about five minutes, which was not only faster, but had the benefit of actually making some sense when compared with the lecture. After a few weeks of this I asked her if she would give me the homework assignment before class so that I could work on it during the lecture, but she wouldn't. (I won't even try to distil her given reason into something that actually makes sense.) Likewise, she wouldn't let me work on homework from another class. However, she would let me sleep…yet another example of why I want to home school my kids. So I guess I'm back again. Much to my husband's chagrin, I go through periods where I don't feel much like writing and periods where I do. Unfortunately, the periods where I don't feel like writing are often the same times where I have an awful lot to write about. Therefore I miss out on writing about all these big important events in my life, which is the whole point of having a journal. So I'm going to spend a little while talking about some of the things that have gone on lately. They'll be somewhat out of order, but at least they'll be there. First of all, Christian's medical condition: it got a lot worse, and then it started to slowly, slowly, get better. We still don't exactly have a perfect explanation for why he felt so bad, but we do know he has sleep apnea and he was put on a CPAP machine for it a few months ago. (It's a machine that raises the air pressure inside your throat so that it stays open and you don't stop breathing at night.) Right now he still doesn't feel all that great, but at least he's not sleeping 18 hours a day. He has lost a lot of muscle and stamina, though, which is normal for any long illness and it will take a long time before he even begins to approach feeling as good as he used to. I'm just glad to have things looking up somewhat; it was very stressful to not know what was wrong with him and what was going to happen. This illness also had the effect of instilling in me a vitriolic hatred of this doctor that Christian went to see on the advice of his mother, who also sees him for her fibromyalgia. We went in for the first appointment and we told him of all Christian's symptoms and his past medical history and such. Dr. Bynam ran some tests to check for things like RA and vitamin deficiencies and mono and such. He also tested some of the trigger points for fibromyalgia, and told us that he didn't think that was the problem. (Fibromyalgia doesn't have a definitive test; they usually diagnose it by seeing if a patient has a certain pain response in the muscles at some number of trigger points throughout the body.) When the tests came back, pretty much everything looked normal. However, the test for mono showed that he had the antibodies that suggested that he had had a past infection of mono. Well, duh, we told the doc that Christian had mono when he was 19. So the diagnosis given to us was a reoccurring mono infection with associated fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue syndrome. Hu? The test for mono only said that he had had it at some point in the past, which we already knew. At the previous appointment, Dr. Moron had said that he didn't think Christian had fibromyalgia. And chronic fatigue syndrome is something that can only be diagnosed after six months of fatigue that can't be explained by any other disease. So basically Dr. Idiot irresponsibly and wrongly slapped the names of some real, but somewhat subjective diseases on Christian and sent him home. This way, Dr. Lazy didn't have to do any more investigation, and since these are all diseases with no real treatment but time and normal good health practices, he didn't have to actually do anything to help Christian other than prescribe him some vitamins. I can see why my somewhat hypochondriac mother in law likes him. He just tells his patients what they want to hear. Of course my anger at him wasn't just that he was lazy and stupid, but that he gave us some sort of diagnosis that played on our desire to simply have an explanation for things, thus allowing us to ignore the problem for another month or so. Time wasted that we could have used trying to find out what the problem actually was. As it was, the only reason we got the sleep apnea test done was because we did some research and went into Christian's family practice doctor and asked for the test. I've definitely learned from this whole thing that it's impossible to get good medical care without educating yourself and taking an aggressive role. Yes, doctors have had years of training and experience, but I've had years of experience living in my body and of the two of us, I'm the one with the biggest vested interest in seeing it get better. While you wait for me to write another entry, go check out the pet page, which I have updated with our new Irish border collie Whin. It's too cute to miss.
