Another day, another doctor

This is an update for friends who I don't want to bore with a tedious email. Instead I'll bore the whole world, bwahahahaha! Ahem. Well, at least people come here by choice. Anyway.

I am doing well, all things considered. Everything is relative these days but I do believe that I have been making improvements. Recent events, I think, show this is true.

In the past five weeks (I checked my calendar) I have had 10 doctor appointments, including 5 new doctors (one of whom was an insurance company doctor, feh) and 2 tests (pulmonary function test and an ENT looking down my trachea - ah, the stories I could tell about that one, and I probably will). Oh, and injections into my knee - cringe inducing, but actually not as bad as you might think. Now, I knew that some of this was coming - not the knee stuff, but a pretty full plate of doctor visits. So I set myself a goal of surviving all of it and of managing my time around the visits without completely falling apart.

Typically, a doctor's appointment is the one thing that I do on that day and more often than not for a day or two after. But that pretty much kills most of the week. I did not want to let that happen to an entire month. I knew that it easily could so I made a conscious effort to keep the rest of my time as unaltered by the doctors as possible. I needed to force myself to at least think of other things. That may not sound like much, but doctors require enough effort that it’s hard to keep going physically or mentally. But I really needed to try, even past the point of exhaustion. I figured that in that way I could be a little more of a real person – and I think I pulled it off pretty well.

It was exhausting, but I expected that, and I managed to keep the days around the appointments as normal* as possible. More importantly, I also managed to keep myself mentally up through it all, more or less – which I am inordinately proud of doing. Since I couldn’t change the physical demands I was trying to work on ways to better handle the mental challenge. I may fall apart at the end of the week, but at least I make it that far – hmm, maybe I’m giving myself too much credit. Well, I’ll take it anyway. I need to see some improvement somewhere.

Therefore I will keep the assessment that I am doing better than last year. However lame the accomplishments, there is no way that last year I would have been able to do this much. With another 6 or 7 appointments in the next month though, I am wondering what the heck I was thinking. Oh boy, July is going to be as much fun as June.

So, that was just some boring detail by way of explanation for feelings of improvement and optimism.

Rambling ends for now.

*A relative term referring to the currently normal state of affairs as impacted by well-known recent events and not any other, or former, state of normalcy.