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For anyone wondering if I'm making any progress, the answer is, "a little", but it seems to be slow and frustrating. As you know, it sometimes seems to take "forever" to get anything done in the medical world.
Today, I was scheduled for an echocardiogram, and some MRI scans, which should have provided the information needed to shed some light on the situation. Unfortunately, the hospital called on Friday, to inform me that due to a death in the family of the person who was supposed to do the echocardiogram, it would have to be rescheduled on the 21st, so now I have 10 more days to wait, for that test. I went ahead and did the MRI today, rather that to try to schedule them on the same day, and have something else come up to squelch the plans.
Of course, my followup appointment with the nuero was scheduled for the 18th, so that had to be changed to the 27th. Unfortunately, my nuero is moving to another hospital, on the first of next month, so there's a good chance that he may want to take off work, the last week of August, to facilitate the move.
I'm hoping that he will meet with me, but I wouldn't blame him if he didn't, since none of this is his fault, and I'm sure that he's anxious to move in to his new office.Since a prospective patient has to go through an "application and review process", in order to be accepted for treatment by a neuro doc at that hospital, I'm not sure how long it will take to be accepted, and I can't even apply, because he isn't "in the computer system", and probably won't be, until next month. Sooooooooo, I seem to be an orphan - a patient with tests to review, and no doctor to review them.
One would think that hospitals would have special provisions to handle situations such as that, but apparently they don't.Because of that prospect, the guy who did the MRI scans today, agreed to provide me with a copy of the scans, on a CD, so that I can get them interpreted "wherever" or "whenever".
He was going to do that today, but then he realized that they might as well put the results of the echocardiogram test on the same CD, so I'll get a copy of both tests on the 21st.At least I lucked out and only had to run through the scans one time. He was supposed to run me through "as is", and then repeat it after injecting a dye into my bloodstream. While the scan was under way, though, he called the doctor, and advised him that the images were clear enough that repeating the scans with a dye shouldn't be necessary, and so the doc let me off the hook. It certainly didn't make me mad to not have to go through that whole routine again. As best I can determine, the CIA could use those machines to persuade the average terrorist to confess to just about anything.
Of course, the downside to that is the probability that if the scans were that "clear" without the dye, there may not be any blood circulating in my brain, anyway.
Evidently, some issue must be pretty obvious, anyway.Right off the bat, I found out that the guy doing the scans had most of his colon removed when he was in his 20s, due to Crohn's, so we mostly talked about IBDs, while I was getting all the junk out of my pockets, so that the machine wouldn't fry me, because of the metal objects. About all that the surgeon spared, (of his colon), was his Sigmoid colon, and every thing downstream from there. Now, all that remains, is loaded with polyps, so something will have to be done about that, pretty soon.
It's hard to win, with IBDs.Anyway, eventually, I'll probably find out what's going on, but at this rate, it's going to take a while.
Tex
You are in the middle of the river trying to get upstream without a paddle. And your boat is leaking.
