Special, Again

Inspirational song: Afraid of Sunlight (Marillion)

Another day, another specialist.

There is a scene in Clue (the movie) when the party guests are so emotionally exhausted that as they shuffle as a group room to room, finding the bodies of further victims, they no longer react. They find the singing telegram girl on the front porch, and they just push the door shut and turn away. This is the level of enthusiasm I mustered to face my latest doctor visit.

I’ve had pain, pressure, and swelling in the upper right quadrant of my abdomen since the night before President Reagan was shot. I remember the date, because I messed up my perfect attendance record at school, but couldn’t even zone out in front of the TV because all the programming had been preempted. I’ve been experiencing pain there for so long, I frequently can’t remember what normal feels like. Sometimes I can block it out, like I did all last year when other stuff was more urgent. It was an off and on kind of problem for my early life, but it has been more constant in later years. Now it is interfering with my breathing, which has had a cascading effect for my overall well-being.

All the testing I had done through December led a pulmonologist to tell me that the right side of my diaphragm is elevated, and he referred me to a surgeon down at Anschutz for a consultation about moving it back down more permanently. I asked the new guy in every way I could to explain exactly why it is higher in that side, in the same spot where I’ve had trouble since 1981. I never got an answer other than what boiled down to they sometimes get paralyzed and sometimes they heal themselves. Great.

So he wants to repeat the one test out of the five I had done that I felt was entirely useless, the sniff test. Maybe repeating it is an okay idea since the guys who did it barely gave me 30 seconds of attention before they declared me just fine and sent me home. But he wants it done at Anschutz, which means another long drive there and back for a test that literally could take less than a minute. With the morning commute today, stop and go on all the interstates, it took me an hour and a half to get there, and an hour to go home.

Once the test is done, he wants to wait. Just wait. He says that sometimes the nerve that gets damaged repairs itself. Sometimes they need to go in laparoscopically and stitch it down to give the lung all the room it needs. I’m in no rush to have another surgery (and I’d happily avoid it altogether), but it’s going to make for a long year if we are waiting for my body to magically regenerate. I’ve been waiting decades, and funny, it doesn’t seem to be doing it.