July 2023 archive

I got next to none of what I wanted, apparently.

The decision was to put me on a beta blocker, among other things, until I could see cardiology.

That isn’t going so well. I’ve been on it for two days and am now explosively coughing, which is a side effect that asthmatic people can have when they take these things (although some of them are better than others, and I wouldn’t trust any more of them going forward). I have tried three different cough medicines that are in this house that I have available to me, and none of them are working to allay this explosive cough. I think this is giving me no choice but to stop the beta blocker, which I can do tonight because I want to stop feeling miserable coughing all of the time. Surely there has to be something else that I can be prescribed that addresses similar concerns without causing explosive coughing that happens at… all… periods… of the day. The benzonatate (“tessalon”) pills that my lung doctor prescribed me aren’t even helping allay this cough, and normally they help with almost everything cough-related. And there’s the on-call nurse until Monday.

Well, I got half of what I wanted, so I’m happy.

I got a referral to cardiology after probably needing one for years when albuterol and prednisone started to cause more problems than they were repairing, and I was put on a beta-blocker and a separate medication intended to help keep me from going into an abnormal arrythmia (and definitely to keep me from having palpitations). Those are supposed to help tide me over until I can get in with cardiology, although I am welcome to a return visit in the event that they… don’t, and we need second-line treatments along with or instead of first-line treatments. All in all, I am happy for this because I felt like people had the impression that thirty-somethings can’t actually have heart problems, even though my own mother had heart problems at this age and hers contributed to her death. She wasn’t on Hospice long enough to have someone be able to come by and turn her implanted device off because she died three days after being put on Hospice, having an oncologist honestly think he could substantially ameliorate the worst grade of lung cancer there is, and her heart came to a full stop in spite of that thing being set to repeatedly shock her (“back to life”) at the end.

Welcome to the jungle, I guess. The things that I said years ago about our… lack of… relationship are still true.

I’d still like to move out of Texas at one point, though. Standard operating procedure for treating angina isn’t even being followed here and I have to ask for it, supposing that I even get it, due to my age. I didn’t know that congenital heart problems had, or have, an age, but go off. Isn’t the whole point of this “early-onset”?

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