So, March.

[which_chick]

It's been a month. I've been getting on my pony, which is fine. Had Finn out for some walks, also fine. Did some work on building the stud pen (for Finn, for later). Went to the doctor for an annual checkup so that they'll continue to pretend to be my doctor because if you don't go often enough they fire you as a client and nobody else in the county is taking new patients.



Doctor said Your cholesterol is too high and maybe she mentioned some numbers but she didn't, like, give me a printout that I could refer back to. The doctor's office has a Web Portal thing and I didn't ASK for a fucking printout because I figured I could go to the Web Portal thing and look at the numbers there.

You only get like seven minutes with your doctor visit, so it's a bit rushed and stuff. There is not time to talk about "This will be reviewable in detail on the web portal, right?" or "I want access to the lab work that I have paid for." or "I have a lot of feelings about this bullshit gatekeeping of information in medical land, please explain to me why I can't see the fucking labs and can only listen to you tell me about the labs, what the fuck are you, a pre-protestant-reformation priest?"

This feeling about bullshit gatekeeping has been an issue for quite a while. Quite a while. That's from 2005 (you have to be on my access-friends list to read it) but it's still medical gatekeeping. I had a mammogram and they wouldn't let me look at the mammogram except the tech went to high school with me and let me peer at them in the light box for like 30 seconds. Luckily I had my digital camera (it was pre-smartphone era for me) with me and I took pictures before she could stop me. Damn this pisses me off so much.

Welp, I got to the web portal (which I am supposed to be using for all my medical interactions because a web server is way cheaper than a human being) and it says the following: "Reviewed during visit". There are no values whatsoever. NOTHING but "Reviewed during visit".

Okay, no. That's not going to cut it. So is there anywhere that I can email or inquire? No. I'm going to have to make a fucking phone call and SPEAK TO A HUMAN. And they're going to want me to come in and pay for a gorram office visit to be told the same verbal information by a Qualified Medical Gatekeeper, said gatekeeping allegedly due to HIPAA or whatever, and that I am not going to remember after five minutes because anything you tell me orally in a doctor's office is FUCKING USELESS because I'm already stressed as hell and just want to be out of there promptly. I am not, as it were, in listening mode. Anyway, listening mode is probably the least useful method of imparting information to me if you would like me to remember the information for longer than the duration of the office visit.

(Sidenote: I graduated Phi Beta Kappa and cum laude from college. I have the clevers. However, the way I learn is not "listening to people talk" even though you might very well think that. Seems legit, right? All you DO in college is listen to people talk. Except... what if I told you that I took copious, detailed, exceptional notes in lecture and then... never looked at them again? The ACT of taking the notes was what put the information into my head. The "listening" part is not super useful for my retention and comprehension, but man, if I write that shit down, I own it. People think I "take notes" to review later, but that is not necessary. The learning occurs DURING the "taking notes" part and there is not a "review later" portion of the program under any normal circumstances.)

So anyway, instead of anything USEFUL, I have an end-of-February note about "Reviewed during visit" and a vague idea that my doctor said something about "cholesterol" and mentioned "statins" which I declined stating that I'd work on it and we'd review the issue in a year.

How high is the cholesterol? No idea. I'm sure she mentioned a number but I do not remember it. I figured I could look at it ON THE WEB PORTAL AT A LATER DATE. God, I'm a fucking dumbass.

Do I have any idea why my cholesterol was "high enough for statins"? Well, yeah.

In the brief minute allowed for "How are things in your life" questions I did mention that I'd been relatively stressed due to thing and other thing and third thing and so forth. (I am under instructions not to write about these things anywhere. They are just... things. So, just take it as read that I have things going on and they are stressful even though they are not visible here.) I mentioned I'd been eating my feelings. On the doctor office scale, I had a BMI of 30 (wearing clothing and shoes).

To clarify, the weekend before the bloodwork, I'd made two large russet potatoes into home-made french fries (double fried in lard) and whipped up (literally) a batch of aoli and then eaten all the fries and all the aoli. That was Saturday. Sunday I made a pound cake. And I ate it. For Sunday. (Did you eat any real food? Of course not. Don't ask stupid questions.) And then I did the overnight fast thing and had blood drawn on Monday morning.

Yeah, I have some idea of why my numbers might have looked like shit.

But I don't know what the fucking numbers are and now I have to make a phone call and admit that I wasn't fucking paying attention couldn't fucking pay attention in the doctor visit and state that I would really like the damn results on the portal or mailed to me or something so that I can process and use that information. And I have to do it using grown-up words and being polite, in the face of the almost certain knowledge that they're going to be all HIPAA about it. Damn it, adulting sucks some times.

How are we doing on the cholesterol improvement project? It's going along. I have stopped eating my feelings. I'm down ten pounds* on my scale at home. I still have a lot of feelings about a lot of things that I'd really enjoy writing assorted screeds about (So very, very Wormtongue. I could meme the shit out of that.) but I can't do that. I'm a bit short on ways to manage my stress levels, tbh.

Oh, you have Things Going On? So... you can't write about them or eat your feelings or talk to anyone except an attorney or medical professional at better than a hundred bucks an hour, so yeah, fuck that noise. I'm not two hundred dollars an hour levels of dysfunctional or stressed. Too many people in my family have had drinking problems, so that isn't an option. I addict pretty fucking easily to addictive substances, so none of that, either. I learned about that with smoking, thanks. Right now I'm working on managing stress with distraction and displacement activities. It's not super duper effective but also I'm getting shit done, so there is an upside.

*Ten pounds a month is not a healthy or sustainable weight loss rate. I can hear you now. Fuck you. I don't have a great... off switch for food. There is no "mindful eating" for me where I just eat until I am full and then stop. I've tried that. I've tried that a lot. I've tried that until I was a buck eighty five (lbs, we use Freedom Units on this side of the pond) on the regular. "Normal people eating" is not a thing that I can manage to make work for me if we would like me to have an appropriate BMI and an appropriate cholesterol level.

You know what does work for me? Not fucking eating. (To be perfectly clear, I do eat, some. It's not very much, never enough to be full.) I'm constantly hungry, but in a way I can generally ignore. After the first two weeks of this shit, there are not "cravings" and there's no binge or purge involved. I just... don't eat. I don't love it, but I can totally do it.

To make this work, my meals are extremely regimented. There is food measurement. I portion with a scale and a measuring cup. I do not make 'extra' and I only cook what I intend to eat. I eat only the planned amount and then I immediately wash up everything and put all the stuff away. I drink a lot more water (it's filling). I don't eat the four white foods (rice, potatoes, white flour, white sugar). Orthorexia is a thing. I know it's a thing. I am aware. I am being alert on that front.

But honestly, food for me is kind of a disordered eating situation already. I don't vomit afterwards and I don't weigh three hundred pounds. I look fairly normal. But I don't... eat like normal people and I never really have. If there were something *like* alcoholism but for food... that would be kind of like what I have.

Alcoholics manage their alcohol intake by quitting drinking. I managed my nicotine intake by quitting smoking. But food is not like that. You can't quit eating food unless you want to quit eating food forever by way of being dead.

I kind of need to eat every day, or at least... most days, most of the time. How problematic would it be to tell the alcoholic... "Look, we know you have a ... problem with drinking, but we need to you to drink one 5 oz glass of red wine at each meal, no more and no less. You must do this at every meal, forever, for the rest of your life. We know that this is just enough alcohol to whet your appetite for destruction drink so that it comes roaring back at every meal but you still have to drink that much and then stop (which you have previously demonstrated an inability to accomplish) every day, three times a day, for the rest of your life. Figure it out."

Also, for fun, you can have a side order of, "Wow, that sounds like disordered eating." for any way you manage to achieve the expected limitation.

Good luck, soldier.

And how would that work with the alcoholics? Hrm? I mean, you'll think you can have a cheat day for special occasions and stuff, but we know how that goes with alcoholics... soon it's not just once a month, it's every fucking night. But food, yeah. We tell people to pull off that shit with food and expect it to work out fine.

And now half the country (including me) is obese. Buck seventy five point nought on the scale this morning, down from 185 in the second half of February. Lookit me go. I've run this race before, for reals, and I'm running it again, I guess. My life is spent looking unhappily at a scale. *sigh* And that's not healthy either, I know. I KNOW.

Argh.

Comments

[which_chick]

Fwiw, I did put on my big girl pants and call the doctor's office and they are mailing me a paper copy of the bloodwork because for #reasons it doesn't autopopulate into the web portal or whatever. (The lab sends it over as a fax. I didn't think anyone at all still had a fax machine.) Anyway, go me with the adulting.

[mistressofmuses]

Medical gatekeeping stuff is infuriating. I'm theoretically appreciative of HIPPA and making sure your medical records can't be accessed by someone pretending to be you or whatever rando off the street... but there's absolutely zero reason to deny the actual patient full access to their own records and results and imaging, etc.

*sad fistbump* on the food and eating stuff. Nothing helpful to say, just... Yeah, I get it.

[which_chick]

Yeah, I've had times (more than once) where they wouldn't let me look at the imaging that I paid for. Like, isn't that MY imaging? I bought it. Why can't I see it? *grrr* Oh, I have to make an appointment and PAY FOR THAT APPOINTMENT and then have a doctor explain to me the imaging? But I just wanted to see it. I just wanted to see. I didn't want to pay for an explanation AGAIN, we already did that part. I wanted to SEE THE PICTURES. It is beyond frustrating.

[mistressofmuses]

Ugh, I know we've had that battle with my partner, trying to get copies of his MRI results and things like that. Like... I get that I'm not trained to read the image, and most people do likely need help interpreting what it means or what they're seeing. Some people ARE capable of reading those images, or want to be able to have them as part of their medical record for a potential future medical professional to be able to view. Once you've paid for those tests, access to the results should absolutely be yours! UGH.

[adafrog]

{{{hugs}}}