For Everything Else

After spending days worrying and fretting about my blood test for hemachromotosis, I had a message on my phone at work:  “Your results are back. Please call”.  I couldn’t read anything from the terseness of the message: it left no clue as to the outcome of the test.  The voice sounded neither cheery nor grave, just clinical.  It sent a shiver down my spine.

I took a few deep breaths to quell the anxiety that was about to boil over, and called back.  My hands were shaking so badly that I could barely punch in the right number or hold the phone to my ear.

I stuttered through my reason for calling a couple of times to different people and was finally connected to Sonja (I think), who told me that my test did not show an elevated level of iron or any sign of hemachrotosis.  It showed, rather, that my iron level is low. My doctor wants me to take over-the-counter iron supplements for 6 weeks and come back for a new test.

In the process of cleaning the house because my mother will be here tomorrow from Tennessee, I ran across information about the disease that I had forgotten.  Detected early on, it’s highly treatable.  Treatment involves having blood drawn a couple of time a week for a year or two, and then once every 3-6 months after that.  And, if I have a blood test once a year, the doctors should be able to detect it in very early stages.

I don’t really know why or how the treatment works, but it seems simple enough.  The prospect of the disease, though, is enough to get me beyond my irrational anxiety about doctors and into a lab at least once a year.  As I said in an earlier post, I’m not done yet. 

I have perfectly good health insurance (it’s better than many policies out there), but I almost never use it.  Mostly because I almost never get sick.  At least not with anything other than a passing flu, and I can tell myself to rest, drink plenty of fluids and wait for it to pass.  Dragging my weary butt to a doctor’s office, paying him and listening to him tell me what I already know makes no sense, regardless of how you look at it. 

I’m better off staying home and getting rest when the alternative is potentially infecting everyone else in the room with my bug and paying for a doctor to tell me what I already know:  I have a virus, it’s not serious and antibiotics will do nothing to rein it in.  Go home.  Rest.  Drink fluids.

Still, having a doctor (or his delegate) tell me that there’s no indication of this potentially fatal genetic disease is priceless.  I’m tempted to say that “for everything else, there’s MasterCard”, but I won’t.  Except that I just did. 

Tonight, I’m getting ready for my mother’s first visit in over a decade.  I have cleaning to finish and manicotti and a fruit salad to make.  I told the doctor that she was coming, and, if I didn’t have a good answer on the disease, she would not give me a moment’s peace.  But I have a definitive diagnosis, so we can concentrate on enjoying each other’s company.  It’s one of my favorite things to do.

And maybe it is true:  “for everything else, there’s MasterCard.”