No, my doctors aren’t Jamaican, however, if I could find a Jamaican doctor who could help me, I’d be all for it.  Hell, I’d be all for it if they were any nationality (even Canadian), as long as they could tell me what the hell is going on in this blunderland of a body I got going on right now.  OK, I know one or two of my handful of readers are Canadian.  Don’t flame me!  I’m married to a Canuck and have to get my ribbing in every now and then.  Especially when my step-daughter informs me with every other sentence that comes out of her mouth how Canada is so much better than the U.S.  Anyway, I’m getting off the subject.  My little Jamaican play on words is referring to the treatment plan I made for myself.  Namely, a week in an all inclusive resort in Jamaica.  Did I hear a few of you say, what mon?  Let me back up and get you all caught up.

When we last talked, which was a while ago I know (sorry, this condition is severely curtailed my writing ability), I was waiting to see a sleep specialist because my general practitioner thought I might have fibromyalgia brought on by sleep apnea.  After waiting weeks to have a consult with the specialist I was told the following.  Yup, I might have sleep apnea after consulting the many, many answers to the 30 page questionnaire I had to fill out.  Yup, they’ll schedule me for a sleep study, in two months of course.  Nope, even if I have sleep apnea he doesn’t think that would have anything to do with the pain, brain fog, and total lack of energy I have.  So his recommendation for that?  Go back to my general practitioner and tell him this was all a bunch of NOPE and try again.

So that’s what I did.  Two weeks later, mind you, because I can never get an appointment any sooner than that.  This time I decided this was going to be a make or break moment.  If I didn’t get some sense of a concrete plan for figuring this out I was going to kick this doctor to the curb and find a new one.  As much as that would drive me crazy, I didn’t think I would have any other choice at this point.  So to make every effort to make this visit a success, I typed up a list of all my symptoms and time line of everything that had happened and the failures of all the diagnoses before.

So with list in hand I greeted the doctor when he came in the examination room.  I told him about my visit to the sleep specialist.  He asks me why I was even discussing Fibromyalgia with him?  What?  You are the one that suggested it might be brought on by sleep apnea!  Oh, yeah he says.  Well, what can I do for you today then?  I handed him the list and after he studied it for a few minutes I told him you can tell me what the hell is going on with my problem!  He held up the list and said by the looks of everything on there you would think you were dying.  I said it feels like I am dying.  He said, relax, you’re not dying.  I said good to know.  So what’s wrong with me?  He says from all of the testing they’ve done it doesn’t look like anything is wrong with me.  How can that be true I asked?  Initial testing you did way at the beginning of all this showed that there was something wrong and that’s why you sent me to a Rheumatologist for an autoimmune disease and got told there that I didn’t have one.  Well, he says, sometimes tests have false positives.  At this point I just took a deep breath and said I got the feeling that nobody was taking me serious.  I’ve been to more doctors in the last six months than I’ve been to in my whole life.  I never go to the doctor for hardly anything and if I am coming here then there sure as hell is something wrong.  I told him that my quality of life was in the shitter.  I can’t do my job properly, I can’t do chores at home, all I want to do is sleep all day long.  Then I spelled out the bottom line for him in all caps, I CAN NOT LIVE THIS WAY ANYMORE!

He looked at me for a moment and then said, again, it’s not like you are dying.  You think that would be a final straw moment and I would resolve myself to the fact that I needed a new doctor.  That very thought was going through my head as I sat there dumbfounded by what he had just said.  Before I could formulate a response, however, he suggested that I might have a low testosterone level and this could be what was causing all my problems.  Now this is something I had actually wondered about before but failed to include it on my list somehow.  It would make a lot of sense if that was the problem.  So he sent me to the lab to get tested and promised to e-mail me the results in a few days.  I was actually feeling better because this seemed like such a viable explanation to all my troubles and I knew there were testosterone shots you could get to make up for low T.  In fact, I was convinced my results would show just this condition as I was opening up the e-mail from him a few days later.  It simply said:

Testosterone levels are normal.  I suggest you see a Rheumatologist.

HELLO?  Paging Doctor Moron!  You already sent me to a Rheumatologist that said he couldn’t find anything rheumatologically wrong with me!  So THIS was the point at which I kicked this particular M.D. to the C..U..R..B.  Off to find a new doctor.  Shouldn’t be so hard right?  Wrong.  I couldn’t find one single doctor in our health care network that was accepting new patients before next year!  After several days of banging my head against the wall looking for one, my wife begged her doctor to take me on as a new patient even though she wasn’t accepting any.  She agreed.  Great, huh?  Yes it is great, but there is a catch.  Two actually.  First catch, I couldn’t get in for another month.  Second catch, she is actually partners with Dr. Moron at the same practice.  However, my wife swears by her and I’ve heard nothing but good things.  It is going to be awkward to walk down the same halls to see another doctor, especially if I bump into Dr. Moron, but I gotta do what I gotta do, even if it stirs up all the brain ferrets in my head.

So what does all of this have to do with a week in Jamaica?  Relax, mon, it’s not like the curiosity will kill you.  See what I did there?

Back in June my wife and I planned a trip like this to celebrate our 15th wedding anniversary.  Other than a long weekend trip to the mountains or to a casino, we had never went on an extended trip together that didn’t involve visiting family.  However, we ended up cancelling those plans because of my health issues.  When I finally decided to see a new doctor, we knew I would be starting over from square one and a solution would probably take even longer to find.  We came to the conclusion that if we didn’t do this trip now, we probably never would for a much longer time.  Since I was waiting for my new doctor appointment anyway, now would be the time.  I was still a little hesitant because I was worried that feeling the way I do would ruin the trip for us.  She pointed out that if we did nothing but lay by the pool or on the beach that at least we could just relax and forget about our troubles for a week.  Also, the all inclusive alcoholic drinks could be considered for medicinal purposes.  That line of reasoning sold me, and we pulled the trigger and flew off to the land of jerk chicken and Red Stripe beer.

It was a really good and relaxing time.  I had never been to an all inclusive resort and I had it in the back of my mind that that it would be cheap food and knock off drinks unless we wanted to pay a premium.  I’m happy to report that was not the case.  The food was top notch and all the drinks were top shelf.  We pretty much stuck to the pool/beach plan.  The swim up bar was a particularly favorite spot of mine.  Sure, I wish I could have felt in better shape to take advantage of some of the off resort things we could have done.  There were mountains there I would have loved to hike but just didn’t have the energy to do.  There were a couple of days I barely managed to make it out of the room but on one of my better days we hired a cab driver to take us around some of the less touristy places so we could see the real Jamaica.  That was a fun day and we got to see a lot of the local culture.  Most of the time we ate, drank, relaxed, and spent some quality time together.  It was just what this doctor ordered.

We are back home now and my new doctor appointment is tomorrow.  I desperately hope to get some answers.  One little wrinkle though.  We got hurricane Florence knocking on our door.  Not sure if that is going to affect my appointment but for now it is still on.  Dealing with preparations for the storm in my condition has been challenging but as my friend Chris always says, that’s another story.

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