Blind by the light bulb. Blood to the bank.

[reddragdiva]

That was a productive doctor's visit! It appears that if you see the non-useless non-fuckhead, stuff gets done. redcountess may not in fact have lupus, but a weird-arse combination of rheumatoid arthritis and thyroid oddness. The non-useless doctor says she will be LARTing the lupus clinic over the six-month wait for a followup appointment, we went to Whipps Cross to get the thyroid blood test redone and Liz will see the non-useless doctor again just after Christmas. And the stick has proven most efficaceous in on-road tests.

I am feeling less worse. Still ill and exhausted after this morning. We shall be having a quiet afternoon.

I have successfully beaten the FreeBSD port of abcde with cdparanoia into behaving (of course even the port doesn't just work - you have to take out all the nice statements, since the FreeBSD 4.x nice is not the GNU one) and am merrily ripping and reripping CDs. Wish I could find Northern Light, dammit.

Comments

[valkyriekaren.livejournal.com]

Ah, thyroid weirdness - so frequently misdiagnosed.
I have a rant on this subject which you probably don't want to hear.
The TSH (Thyroid Stimulating Hormone) is generally a pretty reliable indicator, though. An underactive thyroid is generally very easily treated, though an overactive one is apparently a bit more of a bugger.
If it is an underactive thyroid, redcountess, you'll be amazed at how much better you feel once they get you on the right dosage of thyroxine; it makes a dramatic difference to both physical and mental wellbeing.

[reddragdiva]

"I have a rant on this subject which you probably don't want to hear."

If it's apposite, we may very much want to hear it. The retest is because one thyroid factor was out of whack but the other wasn't.

[valkyriekaren.livejournal.com]

Oh right. Well, if it's under/overactive, it can fluctuate anyway depending on various factors - diet, activity levels, all sorts of things. The doctor is right to check it again if there was a large discrepancy as there could be another underlying problem, or the test itself could have been faulty.

My rant
My rant centres on being mis-diagnosed as having an eating disorder and being referred to a dietician at age 8 because I was gaining weight and my GP didn't believe my mother when she said I wasn't eating anything. Fortunately the dietician was also a very good paediatrician and took one look and said that there was something seriously wrong but she didn't know what it was. They took my pulse, and could barely measure it because it was so weak; they took a blood test which took nearly an hour to do and left me bruised from elbow to wrist on both arms as they tried to get the amount they needed. Two days later a prescription for thyroxine arrived with instructions to start it immediately and return to the hospital the following week. It transpired that I had developed Hashimoto's Myxodoema, an autoimmune condition in which antibodies attack the thyroid gland and destroy it. If I hadn't been diagnosed when I was, I would almost certainly be dead.
The reason it was misdiagnosed in the first place was that it is really very uncommon in children and young people; most people who carry the antibodies are fine until middle age, when for some reason they become active. It's more common in women than in men, and most common in women over 40. Treatment is by measured doses of levothyroxine, an artificial hormone, in tablet form. Symptoms include listlessness, irritability, sudden weight gain without changes in diet, slow metabolism, thinning hair, goitre (swelling) of the jaw and neck, poor skin tone and loss of memory and mental acuity, but not all symptoms are present in every case; in my case, I was still coming top of the class, but felt and looked like hell and developed an evil temper and tendency to tearfulness.

[redcountess]

It's good that the dietician did something. I've been overweight since childhood, but the attitude of my family and my doctors has always been that I just eat too much. I have been tested for diabetes and thyroid before but they were always negative.

[valkyriekaren.livejournal.com]

It helped that up until then I'd always been a very petite, skinny child (apparently worryingly so; I had two school medicals before I was five, because they thought I had 'failure to thrive' syndrome, which is associated with abused/neglected children). So when I suddenly started putting on weight, and went from being a fairly happy, well-balanced kid to being incredibly neurotic, prone to tears and unable to cope with shocks/surprises, my parents knew something was up and made sure I got good care. I was very lucky that the hospital doctor was so on the ball, though.
I hope that your problems do turn out to be thyroid-related, though, as it's straightforward to treat.

[wechsler.livejournal.com]

If you own the NL disc and can't find it, I can give you MP3s.

[reddragdiva]

I shall let you know :-)

[arkady.livejournal.com]

\o/

[ex-jacquelin411.livejournal.com]

I'm happy that Liz had a productive doctor's visit!

And, of course, I hope that all goes well :)

[reddragdiva]

We still don't know what she actually has, but successfully extracting blood from the NHS stone is still pretty good going.

[3blindsplice.livejournal.com]

grip is pretty good for an easy gui ripper.