Picking back up from where we left off...
My testosterone, upon being checked at that doctor's appointment, is 470.
This is now statistically average/slightly below average for someone of my age. The ideal is 500-520 or so, roughly, but 470 is in the normal range.
I feel no differently whatsoever. And, for the record, my blood results for my thyroid were normal -- which will, as planned, make me personally request a full thyroid-specific work-up over the spring/summer, especially if nothing else changes. I respectfully disagree that there's nothing going on there.
However, there were trace amounts of blood in my urine, as I told the doctor there might be. She didn't see it as a huge cause of concern at the moment and said to come back in over the summer to do another pee-in-a-cup test.
A few nights later at work, I noticed a lot more of a pink tinge to my urine than before, and upon a phone call back to the office in the morning, I was set up with an appointment for a urologist three weeks in advance -- it was the soonest I could be seen. Could be something, could be nothing, but they were going to see one way or another.
"I'm scared," I told the wife.
And I am, but I'm also sort of...excited? I don't know if that's the right word to use. I'd like to have an excuse, more than anything else. That's probably the best way to put it.
"Brandon missed work tonight?"
"Yeah, he's got bladder cancer, I guess it was a rough day for him."
Etc.
I don't want pity, but I do want something that can be pointed to as a scapegoat so that people will leave me alone, so to speak. If that makes any sense. A crutch. Something I can point to that other people will say isn't my fault so that I can get a free pass on shit I would otherwise be forced to expend physical and emotional energy on because it would be expected of me.
"Can't work today, I have cancer. I'm salaried anyway, so I'm still getting the same paycheck. Will be back tomorrow or the day after once this particular flare-up dies down some."
Some of you are probably appalled by this. Did you just say you'd rather have some form of cancer than be a fully functional human being who contributes to society?
Yes, yes I did. I'm so beaten down and weary that I kind of just want to retire and not have to deal with it anymore. I did what I wanted to do with my life -- I worked some interesting jobs, met some interesting people, got married, and bought a house. Check, please. Stop the ride, I want to get off. I envy those born into privilege, people who can just up and decide exactly what they want to do with the rest of their lives and when, and if that decision is "I want to watch Netflix and play video games and read comic books all day," then that's what they do.
I've contributed enough to society. I'm burnt out now. This world sucks and I'd like to withdraw from it as much as possible.
In saying this, I would later come to find out I spoke too soon, for multiple reasons -- Coronavirus being one of them, of course, but surprisingly not the most pressing.
Last week, I woke up on Thursday to my foot hurting.
Meh, I thought, must've pulled a muscle in my sleep.
It ached somewhat, and felt a little stiff, but I didn't think much of it. I'm old, my body aches, and I have been known to pull muscles in my sleep. This isn't incredibly out of the ordinary.
I lived with it, woke up on Friday for an interview (I'll discuss this later) to said foot hurting even more, took some ibuprofen for it, which helped somewhat, and went on with my day. By the time the interview was over and I was back home, my foot was hurting so bad that it felt like it was screaming at me.
"What does it feel like?" Daisy asked.
"Sort of like a stress fracture, almost, but I didn't do anything to it."
The pain was primarily the top of my foot, radiating down the inner side, under the arch, and looping around the toe (but not affecting the toe, oddly enough).
"Sounds like gout," Daisy said, showing me an article on her phone.
"I don't think it's gout," I said. "It's the same sprain I get in my foot from time to time that just really hurts for a few days and then goes away after I take enough ibuprofen for a while."
It's shocking that I think like this, but it's true. It has happened before, and usually lasts three or four days at the most before it just, well, vanishes -- and then I go back to normal. It happens in my arms once in a while too, which I have always classified as tendonitis and then treat it the same way.
"Besides," I added, "how the fuck would a vegetarian get gout? It's caused by eating a lot of red meat, organ meats and stuff like that, seafood, and drinking a lot of beer. I do precisely none of those things."
I have had maybe two beers in the past six months and have been vegetarian for a year and a half, going on two this summer. I'm not gonna say I'm the healthiest person on the planet, but I have taken great strides in cleaning up my diet. Indeed, aside from the occasional real cheese or food containing milk or eggs, I am almost 100% plant-based and vegan. I am careful about this. I am meticulous about this. Anyone who knew how I used to eat before versus how I eat now would be shocked and amazed.
But I mean, still, this shit happens.
Anyway.
By Saturday my foot was really swollen and I could barely stand or walk. It was hard to sleep. I couldn't put my foot in a position where it didn't hurt -- elevated, angled, resting, etc. It was maddening. The pain was so uncomfortable it made me sweat. I forced myself to walk on it to to go the grocery store, where I used the cart as a walker, and I'm not sure I've had physical pain so strong in some time. When I went to bed I took 800mg of ibuprofen (which, again, seemed to take off the edge a bit and make it functional to walk around, even with pain).
When I woke up six hours later on Sunday morning, out of a dead sleep because the pills had worn off, I finally agreed that I should probably go to the doctor, because this shit wasn't getting any better at all, and was actually slowly getting worse.
"What's your schedule like tomorrow?" I asked the wife.
"Why?"
"Because I probably should go to the doctor to get this looked at," I said. "It's not getting better. It's awful. My foot is really swollen, red, and hot to the touch, and nothing really seems to be helping."
"Why don't we just go now?" she asked.
It was Sunday afternoon, around 3PM. I was planning to work that night, though the chances of me being able to successfully do so were rapidly dwindling.
"Dr. [Name] isn't in on Sundays."
"Then we'll go to the primary care clinic place, it's open until 8."
I hemmed and hawwed for a few minutes, during which I reached out to my team onsite at work to let them know what was going on. Regardless I'd have to miss work as I didn't think I could even sit at my desk for the entire night.
"Fine," I said. "Let's go."
So I hobbled my ass downstairs to the car, carefully, while my wife gave me the new nickname of "Hobbles," and we went to the clinic.
Going to a primary care clinic on a Sunday night is bizarre. For one, there's nobody there -- I was the only patient in the building, and there was one on-call nurse there and a blood-draw nurse along with the receptionist. The rest of the building was spookily empty.
I filled out the paperwork, did our copay thing, and then waited in the patient sitting room for about 20 minutes for the on-call nurse/doctor/lady to come in and look at me.
"Take off your shoes and socks so I can compare," she said.
I did, and she stared at my foot for a good twenty seconds, then looked at my other foot, then back up at me, then back to the painful foot.
"...what? What is it?" I asked.
"I, well, I don't think this is gout," she finally mused. "I'm leaning more towards a diagnosis of cellulitis based on the redness and swelling. Look at how your foot is swollen and red up past the ankle, and spreading, and compare it to your other foot."
I did.
"Do you appreciate the difference?" she asked.
Note: I don't really remember her asking this, but the wife's reaction to that question, when she told me later, was priceless and I wish I would've seen her face.
"Yes," I said. "It's swollen and red." No shit, doc. That's why I'm here.
"It could be gout and I may be wrong, but I'd like to treat you for cellulitis, prescribe you some Bactrim to quell it, and draw blood to test for both. Worst case is that if it's gout, the blood test will tell me from the uric acid levels. If it's cellulitis, the Bactrim will knock it out."
"Sure," I said.
I mean, sound enough logic, right? I just wanted the shit to be gone so I could go back to feeling normal again.
She had the blood draw lady take two vials of blood, almost completely painlessly for once, and sent me off to the pharmacy for the Bactrim, which we picked up on the way home. As soon as I was inside I popped off the cap and took the first dose.
And...nothing happened.
I had taken the night off, and I tried to just...rest. It had been a really long, bad weekend of pain and I just wanted to not hurt for a while. I slept off and on in the overnight hours, and when I went to bed for good I made sure to take the next dose of Bactrim first. When I awoke, late-morning on Monday, I was still in pain and nothing had really changed. I took the next dose of Bactrim.
The doctor lady called me shortly thereafter.
"How are you feeling?" she asked.
"Well, it hurts," I said. "It's basically exactly the same as it was last night."
"No progress at all?"
"Nope."
"Okay," she said, "then stop the Bactrim. I have your blood test results here and they do show elevated uric acid levels in your blood, so it is probably gout then. I'm going to prescribe you a steroid anti-inflammatory, prednisone, and I want you to make a follow-up appointment with your normal doctor within the next three days, even sooner if you don't start feeling better once you're taking that, okay?"
"Completely stop the antibiotic?"
"Yes," she replied. "I don't see any infections in your blood so it's probably just the uric acid and gout."
Allllllrighty then, doc.
I have always been told that you do not just stop an antibiotic once you start taking it, you have to take the entire dosage over the metered, allotted time. But, she's more qualified than I am, so whatever.
Daisy picked up the prednisone from the pharmacy on the way home from work, and I took the first dose of it as soon as she walked in the door. I decided I could work, that the pain wasn't so severe that I couldn't sit at my desk (and I didn't want to burn another night of PTO).
Here's what they don't tell you about prednisone -- while it will rapidly drain any swelling and get you feeling almost immediately better, that fluid it drains off you all has to go...somewhere.
In my case, once I got to work, I could feel my swelling in my foot go down by at least half within a few hours...and I had to pee seventeen times that night.
Okay, that might be an exaggeration, but not by much.
The other place the fluid felt like it went was to my lungs, which was a little strange.
I don't know if you've ever been drunk, but you know that feeling when you're drunk where your lips feel a bit numb and your lungs feel gummy and, well, liquidy, and it's a little harder than usual to breathe? Yeah, it was that.
By the end of the night at work, "Hobbles" was walking almost normally and the vast majority of my foot pain was gone.
By the next night, the swelling was completely gone, with maybe 5% of the pain left, and I was walking normally again.
By Wednesday and Thursday that week I was back to normal, with no changes but a little aching in my leg similar to when you get a knotted calf muscle in your sleep.
Here's the other thing they don't tell you about prednisone -- some of the side effects are weird.
For the days I was on it, I was constantly hot and sweaty. That is a known side effect -- I mean, it's an anti-inflammatory that is pulling fluid out of you, and sweat is another way for it to come out of you to be sure. The larger part of it is that you're told to drink a lot of fluids as it helps break down any further uric acid buildup.
While I try to stay adequately hydrated, this isn't always completely possible. I work overnights, and that pretty much requires coffee and energy drinks in order to stay awake. Both of those, apparently, are not great for you if it's all you're drinking most of the time, which for me was sort of the case -- I would drink two to five cups of coffee and two or three tallboys of Monster or what-have-you every day, and not much else, just to keep going.
Well, when you go from drinking that to cutting energy drinks out almost entirely (which I have done) and drinking close to a gallon of water every day instead...things happen to your body. I now sweat a lot more, for example. I almost never sweat before, except in the summer when it was super-hot. Now, if I fall asleep in my chair in my bathrobe, and the room is too hot, I'll wake up drenched. This is new.
The prednisone was given to me on a five-day cycle. In addition to it making me sweat more, it sometimes made me a bit foggy or slow as well. Not tired, not like, drunk or anything...but slower. Enough to where I noticed it. Enough to where some people at work noticed it, and I had to tell my fellow leadership peers that it was making me a little spacey but fine, just give me a little more leeway on some things until it wore off, etc.
There IS more, of course, but I'll be covering that in subsequent posts...
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