12:37pm May 20, 2012

Why I take photos of disgusting bodily functions.

The cold is still getting better. The infection is still getting worse. Like now I’ve got what sounds like a smoker’s cough, and you don’t want to know what I’m coughing up. And this is a head cold.

I get grossed out just taking photos for the doctor. Why photos? Because I’ve learned with unfamiliar doctors, that if they can’t visually see what’s going on while you’re in their office. Or if all the wheezing and rattling mysteriously stops during your appointment. Then you will go away without treatment.

And then like as not you end up in the ER which is even more of a crapshoot. I’ve had a lung x-ray where the results were “suspicious for pneumonia” described to me as “everything’s perfectly fine, it doesn’t show anything” – after I aspirated vomit that he insisted on referring to as reflux. By a doctor that my pulmonologist referred to as “that idiot”. He instead spent all his time with me threatening me with the “tickle test” like I was a child.

The problem of needing to document crap is the same problem I’m having with things that are trying to become pressure sores. The LNAs witness them almost every day, but when the nurse visits they’re gone so everything’s fine. Of course my nurse is one of those people who is secretly afraid of and/or disgusted by disabled people, and rather indifferent to our needs, but hides it all behind a fake smile and fake concern and affection that makes me want to hide under my bed. Sometimes I wish I didn’t have such a finely honed intuition for these things, it makes my skin crawl. At any rate I’m contemplating having an LNA snap a picture of my ass on a bad day just so i have proof that we aren’t all imagining things.

I am luckier than a lot of people though. I have a good GP. He understands things like my hip joints that slide around just far enough to be excruciating but not far enough to show up on an X-ray. Probably because he has family members with shit like that. He will happily tell you that most medical conditions have no name yet (or only an obscure one) and that the tests doctors perform are crude even at their best in terms of figuring out what’s wrong. But everyone including other doctors knows he’s really good so he’s usually booked months in advance. The people I see on short notice are either ER docs who are mostly aware of the really major stuff like trauma and heart attacks, or else residents who think they know everything. So I’m reduced to photographing phlegm and hoping to hell that they understand what bronchiectasis is (a scary number insist I mean bronchitis).

Oh and don’t worry. I will never post these kinds of photos. I don’t even like looking at them myself. But I take them, because I don’t want to have to land in the hospital before anyone takes me seriously. I swear it’s only people who don’t have chronic illness that think the medical system is perfect and infallible.

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