Live While You Can!
What a wild, sad, and terrifying month. I know it sounds cliche, but never take your health for granted. I just learned that lesson in a terrifying way. Two ways actually. The first was with my own health and the second was my father in law. Regarding my health, I went to a doctor (actually a PA here in Santa Fe) for my blood pressure and I thought I’d bring up a mole that I thought looked kinda funky while I was there. She didn’t even care about my blood pressure that she called “moderately elevated” even though my vision was darkening briefly with every heart beat. Instead she looked at the mole and freaked out, saying that it was “concerning”. Then she told me look up and when I did she literally recoiled from me exclaiming, “Your thyroid is HUGE! Does it hurt? I can’t believe you don’t feel that! How has nobody said anything about it to you?!” She asked me if I had driven myself to her office and when I told her no, my wife was waiting in the car, she walked me out to the car and told my wife that she needed to take me to the hospital’s emergency department right then. I told my wife I didn’t want to go, that I’d wait to see my regular doctor in Texas.
I made an appointment with my PCP in Texas and we drove to Texas. A day before my appointment I got a message that my doctor wouldn’t be there so they set me up with a PA. I’d never heard of this PA before but I decided to keep the appointment. I told her what happened in the PA’s office in Santa Fe so she checked me over. She didn’t freak out like the one in Santa Fe, but she still worried me when she said, “I realize you’re probably looking for some reassurance, but I can’t do that.” She told me the mole was “irregular” and needed to come off and be biopsied. I didn’t expect it to be cut off right then but that’s what happened. It was on my neck under my chin, not exactly where you want a scalpel to be. I went ahead and did it. She gave me two injections in the area to numb it and I felt something running down the side of my neck and I thought it was was the stuff she had in the syringes but she said, “No, that’s just blood.” Blood? From an injection?? Anyway, she then went to cutting and finally cut the mole off. Then she showed me a small yellow stick that she said was going to cauterize the blood vessels to stop the bleeding.
She had also checked my thyroid and said I needed an ultrasound on my thyroid because there was a small nodule on it. She didn’t say anything about my thyroid being “huge” like the PA in Santa Fe. Waiting for the biopsy results SUCKED! It’s extremely difficult to wait over a week to find out if you are going to get very bad news. Especially since I’ve just come off over 20 years of benzos. That tested me hard. I finally called the office and asked about my results and was told that the results were in but they were “waiting on a provider to review them”. I actually told them to hurry up because I was getting antsy. Two days later they sent me a message via the patient portal that the mole wasn’t cancerous. They need to come up with a quicker way to get results. People shouldn’t have to wait so long to find out if they are in trouble or not.
After that mess, my father in law went into the hospital for abdominal pain of unknown origin. They ran all sorts of tests and found what they thought was the reason for his extreme pain. It was something that’s actually fairly common so nobody was really worried too much. 24 hours later my wife got a call that the family was being summoned. We were back in Santa Fe 600 miles away. We started packing and loading the car as quickly as we could. We were in the car but not even out of Santa Fe yet when the phone call came saying that he was gone. He was gone so fast.
Never take your health or the people you love for granted. You really never know when it can all be snatched away from you and it can happen so fast that it’s hard to make any sense of it. It’s really scary how fast everything can change. We live in a society/culture that can so easily make you forget the things that are important because it seems all we do it drudge through… Work, eat, sleep and repeat. Day after day the same thing. Until it’s not. Then it’s over. Just like that. No more time to do the things you wanted to do. No more time to make plans. No time to even say goodbye to your loved ones. No more time for anything!
Do that thing you’ve always wanted to do. Tell your loved one’s how much you love them. None of us know how much time we or our loved ones have. People say nobody is promised tomorrow. The real truth is, nobody is promised even the next hour.