I went to my doctor today. After bleeding into a bunch of vials, wearing a Holter and peeing into a jug so they could do tests, I had to go over the results of those tests with the doctor. The result was that everything looked normal. My blood was normal, my heart was normal and my pee was normal. Apparently, I’m as healthy as a very healthy horse. Except I’m clearly not, which is why I had all these tests done in the first place. So, the diagnosis for now is that I am getting atypical migraines. They may be caused by stress or they may be caused by hormonal changes. I guess men of a certain age go through hormonal changes that can cause all kinds of wacky things.
All this has done a great job of reminding me that medicine is not an exact science. I’ve always known that on some level. Physics isn’t even an exact science (math and logic might be, but they aren’t even sciences). I think that’s another reason why I’d be a bad doctor (the primary reasons being that I find everything medical to be absolutely terrifying and I pass out around needles and blood). If I were my doctor, I’d be ordering more tests, keeping me overnight for observation and whatever else I could think of. Not so much because I wanted my patient to get healthy, but because the mystery would drive me crazy.
I’m glad my doctor isn’t like me. I’ve had enough with tests and doctors for a while. I’m content to trust her diagnosis. I just don’t know how she does it.
