Sound repetitive? Tell me about it. Today my dad and I headed out to the Internist's. We were hopeful, because he's a very good doctor and we knew we were going to hear back on a bunch of tests that I had done a few weeks a go. When we were on our way there, I was thinking "This might just be the day that I find out what I have..." I was also praying that God would finally give us a diagnosis, because we're about to go nuts without one. My internist is probably the best doctor I've had so far. He lets me talk and he is very, very thorough. After talking for awhile and doing a check up, he brought my dad into the room and sat down on his stool and paused just long enough for me to think "This is it... this is when I find out what's wrong with me." Then, he said "We have no idea what's wrong with you. All of your tests are coming back negative, but there's obviously something wrong." I could tell he was frustrated, and my sobbing made it beyond obvious that I had had enough. What caught me by surprise was that he said I needed to start treatment. How in the world do you treat something when you don't know what you're trying to treat?!
Basically, he's going to act as if one of the millions (okay, that's a slight exaggeration) of infections that I've been tested for came back as a false negative and put me on doxycycline for 3 weeks. One of three things will happen: I'll get healthy and we'll never know what was wrong, I'll get healthy while I'm on the antibiotics and then I'll get sick again when I get off of them (which means I have some type of chronic bacterial infection... Lyme is an example of this), or nothing will change (which means it's not bacterial, and it's some other type of disease). I had to agree in order for him to prescribe it, because he wasn't technically treating something. Part of me didn't want to agree. I was upset, and I thought it was a stupid idea. I'm not quite sure why I thought it was a stupid idea, but I really wanted an answer. I looked at my dad, who said "I think we need to do this" and seeing as he's my dad and dad's generally know a lot more about life than me, I agreed.
I was very upset after, but thankfully I had an appointment with the psychologist (who's helping me with the mental part of being chronically ill) right after my doctor appointment. For the most part, it was pretty helpful. She felt terrible that we didn't get any answers and she suggested that I should look into going to the Mayo Clinic. We've talked about it before, but in order to get in, you need to get referred by a doctor... and then they need to accept you. She also talked about how I should try to make some sort of routine for myself since I can't be at school this semester. She said that I should try to go to bed and wake up at the same time every day and keep myself busy doing stuff. That's when I wanted to scream. Healthy people don't always remember that a sick person has trouble with these types of things. Sometimes all I can really do is sleep. That kind of messes with having a routine. I'm kind of living in slow motion right now. When I feel good, I do stuff. When all I can do is sleep, I sleep. I can't really plan that.
Right after that, I headed to my swimming lesson (yeah! I'm learning how to swim! I'll blog about that later...), which made me forget everything for a little while. THEN, I came home to... A BUNNY! My dad and I drove out to Aunt Jen and Uncle Andy's to pick her up yesterday. I'll blog more about that later to... because my brain is DEAD.
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