Medical Update

My medical woes continue, but I’m still on the right side of the grass. It’s like I’m trying to set some sort of record for the most and most diverse medical conditions. Three weeks ago I woke up with a backache on my left side, a little painful but livable. After two days it had migrated upward to my left shoulder, then to the center of my back and up to my neck. Migrating. What’s that all about? Then last Sunday it had moved to the left side of my neck right where neck and shoulder connect. It was painful enough that I had to get up in the middle of the night and sit upright till morning. Pain. So I went to the Same Day Care clinic to see what they could do. I was told after a brief examination that it was probably tense muscles. Well, yeah, tense because I couldn’t move my head in any direction, right or left, up or down. The doctor gave me a prescription for a muscle relaxant. I took a pill that night, woke up like a drunk and stumbled into the bathroom dizzy as a tornado. The next day I took another and went with Rosalie to a movie. She almost had to carry me from the car I was so dizzy and unsteady. That was the last muscle relaxant I took. I tried Icy Hot stuff, I tried a heating pad. Neither had any effect. The neck pain decided to slide to the right and occupy the right side of my neck, even more painful than before. Two hydrocodons later, the pain was manageable until morning. At which time, I remembered my episode with fibromyalgia in both shoulders a year or two ago. So I did a web search and found that the muscle pain of fibromyalgia tends to come and go and can move to ever more exciting locations in the body. Ah ha. And I found that there’s no explanation for fibromyalgia and no cure, just treat it with pain pills and wait for it to exit, sort of like an episode of gout, another pain I’ve had in my catalogue of ills. All right. Back to my record-breaking list. In the last nine years, I’ve had approximately thirty surgical excisions of squamous-cell cancer on my two calves, from knees to ankles. An abdominal aortic aneurism was discovered when we went to an annual health checkup, a condition I have checked twice a year. Sometime about six years ago, my blood showed an abnormality in the red corpuscles. So I went to a hematologist to see what the problem was. She took a bone marrow sample from my hip and told me I had a condition called myelodisplasia, a kind of mini-leukemia. Okay. So now I have my blood drawn and examined twice a year to see that it’s not getting worse. Now for the skin conditions. About four years ago, I was visited by psoriasis on my calves, from just below the knees to the ankles. And my dermatologist also told me I had seborrheic dermatitis on scalp, forehead, ears, and nose. Wonderful. And rosacia on my left cheek. Wonderful. All right, now, the list: squamous cancer, gout, abdominal aortic aneurism, myelodisplasia, Valley fever, blocked renal artery requiring a stent, a radiation wound which is still not healed after two and a half years of visits to the wound center, fibromyalgia, seborrheic dermatitis, psoriasis, and rosacia. That’s my list. Do I win? I guess I should ask, do I lose?