Friday, Jan. 21, 2005
You're Gonna Put What?!? Where?!?
When I first got this job, one of the things that I was most excited about was finally getting health insurance. I hadn�t been to a doctor for a real checkup in about 3 years. Well, actually I had been to the University Student Health Center several times, but I quickly came to realize that those �doctors� don�t know what in the hell they are doing. Like the time I had strep throat, I went in and told them I had strep throat and instead of giving me antibiotics, they gave me a pregnancy test and a mono test. Test results came back, and guess what�.I had strep throat. Dumb asses.
But I digress. After my first 3 months on the job, I finally received my insurance. Blue Cross/Blue Shield. The first thing I did was I found a primary physician that was also a gynecologist and scheduled my appointment. I went in and I was otherwise an extremely healthy 20-something, except for traces of blood in my urine.
Now, I am highly suspicious of doctors. I feel like they make you come in to �get looked at� and to take a bunch of different tests so that they can get paid more. For instance, every time I went to the dermatologist, I had to pay $25 for the doctor to look at my skin, suggest I get a skin peel, and write me a prescription for Retin-A micro, which she did all in under a minute. At that rate, she could possibly be making $1500 an hour.
So when my doctor suggested that I get additional testing done to figure out this blood-in-urine problem, half of me was skeptical while the other half of me expressed my inner hypochondriac that believed that there really might be something wrong. Needless to say, I wanted to make sure there wasn�t something wrong so I agreed to the tests.
Test 1: The IVP
An IVP is an intravenous pyelogram. Basically, they shoot you full of iodine, wait for the iodine to go through your kidneys, bladder, and ureters to stain them, and then take x-rays. Easy, right? That�s what I thought. Except that your kidneys, bladder, and ureters are all behind your intestines. To solve this problem, they make you empty out you intestines by forcing you to starve yourself. First, they tell you you can�t eat/drink anything except water and chicken stock. The chicken stock was so gross it that it couldn�t even be helped with salt and pepper. Ugh. Next, they make you drink this lemony tasting salt drink that increases the salinity in your intestines to draw water out and make you shit. Watery shit. Because you haven�t eaten anything all day except water and chicken broth. Then, they make you take a suppository to ensure that your intestines are completely empty, although you haven�t eaten anything all day except for water and chicken stock, and four hours before, you�d already emptied your intestines thanks to the nasty lemon-salt drink. The point, I was so damn hungry that my hands were looking like steaks. I had the damn IVP and the results: PERFECT. Absolutely nothing wrong.
Test 2: The Ultrasound
Since the IVP was a bust, my doctor suggested I get an ultrasound to make sure I didn�t have any small kidney stones that might not have been picked up by the x-ray. This was the easiest of the tests. Results; The technician told me I had extremely nice kidneys and that they were practically perfect.
Test 3: The Cystoscopy
My doctor, still not convinced that the blood might be some natural anomaly that I might have decided to send me to the urologist to make sure I didn�t have polyps in my bladder that might be the source of the blood. Let me just say that I was the only person (besides the people that worked there) who was under the age of 65. With a cystoscopy, they insert a small camera up your urethra (where your pee comes out) and into your bladder and look around for a minute. Let me tell you that I was not happy about this one. The technician came in to prep me and she said, �You don�t look to happy�. Well, I don�t think anyone would be excited about getting this type of super invasive procedure done. Anyway, it was the most uncomfortable thing I have every experienced in my life. All of that just to tell me that my bladder is completely normal and healthy.
Hopefully, all of this will finally convince my doctor to give up on all this. Thank god my insurance covered all of it. I�m mainly pissed because it still hurts when I pee (I had the cystoscopy on Tuesday) and the doc told me it would only hurt for the next couple times I peed, not the next couple days. Man, I hate doctors.
summerroll at 2:33 p.m.