Monday, April 22, 2013

I'm sitting on $2K

Really.

I am sitting on two thousand dollars.

See this shot?


It costs two thousand dollars. Guess where they injected it?

I am sitting on two grand. Tomorrow, I'll get another shot injected in the other side. Then, I'll be sitting on four thousand dollars!

Suddenly, that whole conversation where the doctor was all, "What do you do?" and I was all, "I'm a teacher," and he was all, "We'll wait for the insurance to approve the Thyrogen regimen before we schedule it," makes a LOT more sense.

I have a valuable tookus, I tell ya.

The good news is, I didn't experience any side effects from the Thyrogen today. They made me sit there for about twenty minutes after the injection to make sure none of the side effects manifested. What side effects? Well, there's nausea and dizziness. There's headaches and diarrhea. And, oh yeah, there's paralysis and death. It was a tense twenty minutes. But I'm fine.

Better than fine. I asked the doctor to check my TSH because I've been feeling super-crappy lately.  Really, since I started the low iodine diet, I've been sick. I thought maybe I needed to up my meds again.

Here's what we learned: The lab at UAB does NOT, in fact, take 48 hours to return the test results to your doctor. In fact, if your results are "interesting" enough, your doctor will call you just a few hours after you got the blood drawn.


Turns out, I'm sick because I'm taking too much synthetic thyroid hormone. Ooooohhh. Huh. I've been ordered to skip my meds until Thursday and then start back on a lower dose. The good doctor sounded... concerned... on the phone. My hyperthyroid number was off the charts! Literally. It didn't measure. That's not a good thing. Oops. Meh, what can you do?

The moral of this story, kids, is to trust your gut. Tell the doctor when something feels wrong and get it checked. Don't assume you have the same stomach virus that everyone else has and you're just special because yours lasts two weeks while everyone else kicks it in ten hours.

Anyway, the Thyrogen is tanking my hormone levels, but I feel fine. It's all supposed to make the radiation more effective on Wednesday. Then, that pesky cancer won't come back.

So far, so good.

2 comments:

  1. I'm so glad you didn't experience any side effects--in particular, the last two! We miss you at Drake!!

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    1. You, my dear, are just like Snapple: made form the best stuff on Earth.

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