Doctors Are Like Congress

It's too early for a Saturday morning when I start this, too early for any morning really, but when you can't sleep you start the day early. It's a cool 62°, windows open and the birds are singing outside. I am about to get up and grab that first cup of coffee. Not quite 5:15am.

There is going to be some Saturday morning rambling, so grab your favorite drink and read along if you wish.

I don't know where to start because my mind has been covering a lot of topics since 3:15am ... just after I got up for a bathroom visit and couldn't get back to sleep. Was it my doctor's appointment yesterday or that tv weather graphic up top that turned last night into a sleepless night?

No, no stress about my health or the doctor ... I'll eventually get to that story. It was Walter, snoring so loud and so deep you would have thought his breathing and snorting started in his toes and worked up to his nose. It went on for almost an hour before I heard him choking/snorting a little to clear his throat. LOL

It did give me time to go over things in my head ... which I will discuss as I write this.

Those poor folks in the pink triangle had a terrible night, down in Kentucky. The crew and I are located just to the left edge of that red and blue tv weather icon. Luckily for us again, it was near but around us. Those warnings of severe rains and high winds starting in 22 minutes, kept repeating itself for another warning in 30 minutes ... on and on.

At the time of this writing I have not looked at the weather news to see what the damage was or where it was. I will say from the two videos sent to me by friends up where I use to live, it might be ugly up there. I don't know yet. Their personally taken videos shows the funnel cloud on the ground heading their way.

So personally I would classify that tornado warning as anti-climatic at my address ... much like my doctor visit yesterday.

I almost forgot to mention that when these storm warnings were taking over my phone and my watch, I looked to "my main weatherman" Walter ... he is never wrong about the weather and he was showing me it was a lot of tv weather noise we did not have to worry about.

For example at 6pm when the trees were to be blowing and my yard full of rain ... I stepped out on the patio step to focus my iPhone to the SW ... that is the sky I saw. That first photo of the tv radar was an hour after this photo was taken.

I assume you are wondering by this time how that blog post title "Doctors are like Congress" plays into the early morning rant. It has nothing to do with storms, hounds, dogs, or ballgames ... it does have a lot to do with my doctor visit yesterday and the total BS going on in Washington DC.

Like the storm last night, my appointment was anti-climatic, which is good, but at the same time it reveled a lot of good information. As in facilities, services and a good doctor. 

This local facility is so much different than I experienced in Sierra Vista, and why wouldn't it be. A SW desert town of 44,000 or a small city of 120,000 that has literally everything you need. From two small universities, medical facilities all over town by different company names along with an airport that flies to any major city.

What is nice if I choose these services, everything can be done in the same building on a different floor ... not 62 miles away at the nearest VA Hospital. So that is good.

Now to make things clear, yes just a couple of days ago I said I would not be writing about my health issues if any, in detail here. That does not mean I cannot talk about facilities, services offered and doctors.

Just like I do not tune into any tv news anymore, not even local news but that does not mean I don't see what is happening in Congress because X force feeds me news whether I want it or not, but filtered by me with secure settings where I can block out words or accounts. Still ... some of those blocked words gets around the security wall when another account I don't know forwards something they think the world should see.

So let's get back to the doctor appointment. 

I had no doubt I would have a good experience there based on the differences I found between civilian health care and VA health care 2019 in Sierra Vista and Tucson Arizona. The differences here were just as obvious with added features. Not having to drive 62 miles to get an echocardiogram is a good thing ... I only have to take the elevator or the stairs to the 3rd floor.

There was no check-in desk when I walked in the building. That threw me for a second until the table with three volunteers steered me in the right direction and floor after I told them what I was there for. As I walked to where I should be I could see that each department had its own check-in stations and their own waiting rooms.

I had not made more than two moves on my addicting game Block Blast (play it sometime and find out), before a nurse stepped out calling my name with a folder of my information. She was friendly and we got right to the point to see I had dropped a couple of pounds with my clothes on from two weeks ago and for some reason her digital machine thought I had shrunk an inch in height somewhere in time.

All my vitals were good, some very good she said. Looking at the numbers I agreed. That will always be the mystery too me with my heart issue. If it is as bad as the claim why do I always above average vital data points? From what I have read, those data points show my issue is minor to moderate and has continued to be the same for the past five and a half years. 

My doctor was a small Indian lady with 26 years experience. I had read her reviews online before I went and found out she had been seeing my friend up the street for years. She was rated high as a good doctor. She was hard to understand sometimes because of her accent being spoken in a quiet soft tone.

She was an intent reader of information as her eyes went from paperwork printed out back to her computer screen which showed my account with information that even I could not access. I've tried on my online account the other day. She asked questions, and took notes while reading and looking between the papers and computer screen.

Things of interest, she would circle in her notes for example, how long I have had this cough ... 14 months.

Another mystery ... as she listened to me through a stethoscope she could hear my heart murmur as they all can over the past years .... "your lungs are clear".

How can that be? Can't you hear that sound of trapped mucus in my cough ... that rough sound in the airwaves as I breath, similar to a purring cat??

She prescribed Fluticasone Propionate nasal spray. Not on that linked website but on Grok, Elon Musk's AI on X ... told me it reduces inflammation in nasal passages. To me, that was the key, inflammation reduction.

You can see/use Grok at grok.com

I cannot download chatGPT because my iMac doesn't have the new chip needed. I don't use Google's AI because it is politically influenced, not a surprise. BUT Grok will tell me when something is not true and WHY it is not true. It is much faster finding information compared to using a search engine.

Things were going good during this session. I had a list of questions in my iPhone notes I wanted to ask and that is when "Doctors are like Congress" came into play .... she was good but just like most of if not all the doctors I talked to in 2019 and just a few weeks ago.

IMO ... they don't listen and do things for their own best interest, no so much for the patient or taxpayer in the Congress comparison. Congress does and is doing the same thing now, whatever is in their own best interest. 

She did that ... borderline ignored what I asked ... Ivermectin * low carb diets * different diets * Lignosus ... a natural respiratory health supplement * possible causes of cough * high pollen and allergy based cough or something else

As she was asking me what meds I was taking every month (the usual answer NONE), always surprises the medical field, I had listed all the vitamins I take and had added those four new products I bought last week ... I showed her the same photo of them I used in my last post.

She never asked what they were, what they did (as expected), just handed my phone back to me and said nothing. No interest in natural based healing. She also was not interested that I could track my heart rate on my watch no matter if I was sleeping, watching a game, walking the dogs/hounds or mowing the lawn.

I expected all those responses so it really didn't bother me. 

It always in my critical mind brings up the question which side of the slope is she on ... her personal reasons for becoming a doctor or the profit side of whom she is working for?

Believe me ... in 2019 and my only experience in this hospital circus, I saw both sides from different doctors so the question is always in the back of my mind. 

I will see more of it in action next Tuesday afternoon as I go in for an echocardiogram which I was wanting to do then sit and listen to a cardiologist that will most likely repeat the same things things/his options that I heard in 2019.

The appointment yesterday gave me everything I was looking for because in the end I want to compare the data with my 2019 results and note any changes.

• a good doctor for a primary care poc
• a chest x-ray
• lab work of my blood
• an echocardiogram

Those last three items will give me all the information I need to decide what is going on and what's next. 

What I have found in my short experience dealing with doctors, they see keywords in a prognosis and automatically jump with glee because in their minds they can fix something. Like a lot of old VW bus owners (young owners old vehicles) I use to run into .... they just loved it when their 1960 bus had mechanical problems because now they could work on it. Typical gearhead.

Some of you might not know, before 2019 I never went to doctors and had no reason to. I hadn't had a physical or bloodwork in over 20 years. My last one was required by my job. I was never too sick that a small clinic with a nurse practitioner couldn't handle. If I had not made a mistake and wrecked my bicycle that day, I still would not have gone to a doctor because I haven't had any reason to.

Now once I saw the results of my bloodwork in 2019 I wanted an annual so I could compare numbers on a spreadsheet from year to year just like I do with weight, fat calipers and tape measure around my stomach. 

Once I found out what I had I wanted an annual echocardiogram to monitor that gap ... there were reasons that did not happen after 2019.

So overall it was a good visit. I got what I wanted out of it, something I did not get a couple of weeks ago.

Yet .... this medical circus is just like a "to do" list for a house I have found. I have to be on my toes because I know that all the doctors want to be involved and just like a house ... while you are fixing one thing, two more different things are added to the list.

Thus turning it into a non stop merry-go-round of appointments, medicines and different doctors telling me what I need no matter what the heart rate and blood pressure shows me on a daily basis while sitting on a couch watching a ballgame or strenuous activity outside.

Since I mowed my backyard the past few times in different directions and lasting over an hour of increased activity with normal heart rates WITHOUT having a shortness of breath .... I am going to jump on my bicycle today, on the inside trainer, to ride easy and monitor my heart rate and see if that feeling of shortness of breath comes back. It was last year in March 2014 during the first mow of the year, I had to take a break 9 minutes into the increased activity. 

What can I say. The striping on the wall is from this room being a baby's room for a past home owner. It really did look good with all she had in this room and the design. It is just too far down my "to do" list where I paint over it and change the color on all the walls. 

After my appointment and a Mexican restaurant next door and a parking lot full of cars ... I had to have lunch. My normal ... carnitas burritos. Only yesterday was the worst I had ever eating. No aluminum foil wrapping warm tortillas and a skillet of hot cooked carnitas with a large plate of rice, beans, avocado and sour cream like I was used to.

A plate with a big burrito that thad been wrapped closed, then friend on the grill. By the brown marks on the burrito you could tell there was a heavy press on top of it while it was on the grill, both sides cooked. Nothing else on the plate. No sides of beans, rice, avocados or sour cream ... because the beans and rice (very little of both) was wrapped inside with the carnitas in small quantities. 

Although the restaurant names were the same, the 101 mile difference in location made a world of difference in my carnitas burrito.

This morning as I lay in the darkness with the light from the moon shining through the window perpendicular to the end of my bed I thought about a lot of what is going one. There is really no health crisis, no emergency ... I just went in to find out about this cough I cannot get rid of after 14 months.

Directions say I will not have the full effect of the nasal spray for 21 days but I will say that last night and so far this morning I can take a full deep breath without coughing. 

I am anxious to see the results of the lung x-ray, and the bloodwork on Monday. She will get the results on Monday so I might see them soon after I am guessing. 

So I imagine after seeing the results it will be the same as 2019, when I will see them a year later for the same data. Only in 2020 my appointments were canceled due to the pandemic, then I moved, then it took forever for the VA to transfer my records from the "west" to the "midwest" categories. 

Weather is fantastic, I will get some things done outside today. It might be a nice day to open both garage doors, while keeping the hounds and dogs out of the garage ... then sort and put away stuff on the work bench along with the bench in the shed. 

I hear these keep the ticks, fleas and mosquitoes away ... I will repot those today. So far none of the hounds or dogs had any interest in eating them. It's nice they all seem to be out of their puppy stages or destruction. Even all the end pieces of the patio deck have not been pulled out and chewed on like in the past.

There is nothing better than Nutty Fruity Dried Mangos from Costco ....

A great morning here in "the tropics" of Southern Indiana.