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| cutesy bandage as a reward for giving blood |
My numbers this morning before I left:
At the hospital, I got only the following info:
Interesting that my diastolic went down when I got to the hospital. Stress usually makes my numbers go up. No surprise that my fasting glucose went up; the hospital's way of measuring it is apparently more stringent or just calibrated to give higher numbers. Happens every damn time, and I finally complained about it today. I told the doc I'd taken my blood-sugar reading this morning and had gotten a 74. Her response was little more than a noncommittal "Oh." Being a creature of the health-care system, she probably trusts only the hospital's instruments.
Both docs remarked on the fact that I had lost a few kilos; the diabetes doc told me to keep it up, and that a few kilos more would be nice... as if I didn't know that already. She remarked on improved blood pressure, good urine-glucose numbers, and the return of decent kidney function. (I wonder what the problem had been; it's not as though I guzzle regular sodas by the 2-liter bottle anymore.) I was glad to see an A1c of 6.8. I'll keep using my home formula to track A1c on my own, but I'll always consider the hospital's reading to be the "official" reading.
More important than the diabetes doc today, though, was the cardiac doc. More on him in a sec. I barely slept at all last night, and I was up at 5:30 a.m. and out the door by 6:20. I caught a cab and got to the hospital a bit after 6:30, which was fine because the phlebotomy (blood-draw) clinic opened at 6:30, and barely anyone was there when I lumbered up. I had decided to come early to give myself a large time margin:
6:30-ish: give blood and urine samples
8:10 a.m.: echocardiogram (ultrasound)
8:30-ish: eat something (I'd been fasting—as I always have to before my appointments)
9:40 a.m.: diabetes-clinic appointment
10:10 a.m.: cardiac-clinic appointment
Coming early proved to be the right choice. I have nightmares that I might one day oversleep and miss all of my appointments, which means I need to learn the Korean way to say reschedule. With a comfortable amount of time between the echocardiogram and my first appointment, I went to the first-floor bakery/snack bar (it's a branch of the Artisée bakery), grabbed a salad and, unapologetically, a moist blueberry muffin and an apple juice, found an empty seat, and chowed down. Nothing beats breaking a fast, and as the proverb goes, Hunger is the best sauce. I was still hungry by the end (the salad was barely the size of something you'd get on an airplane), but I'd eaten enough to tide me over until lunch.
The ultrasound went well. The nurse politely commented on my understandable Korean but engaged in no other conversation. Once she'd lubed me up and started scanning, her verbalizations were little more than "Roll onto your left side" and "breathe in" and "now relax and breathe out" and, at the end, "We're finished." I wiped the lube off my torso (I'd been made to change into an ill-fitting hospital shirt) and made to leave; the nurse said nothing about the ultrasound results, which I'm sure she was skilled enough to read.
I already told you about the diabetes doc, so let's skip ahead to the cardiac doc. Miraculously, the diabetes doc finished early enough that I was able to go back down to the cardiac clinic with time to spare; I had thought I was going to be late. And the cardiac doc saw me right on time at 10:10. I guess there weren't many old patients today, asking their usual million questions and just wanting to talk, talk, talk. The cardiac doc is an amiable, quietly jocular guy, and when I told him I was worried about what the ultrasound results were going to show, he said that, if anything, I had shown radical improvement. This was both heartening and saddening: at a guess, a lot of the improvement was thanks to last year's walk. But I was sad because I knew that there would be no walk between today and my next appointment, so there's a good chance I might get worse over the coming months. But I also felt a niggling twinge of distrust: I told the doc about my chest pains, especially if I tried to walk right after eating, and he said that, based on the ultrasound, there'd been no worsening of my blockages and, in fact, there seems to have been a lot of improvement. ("엄청 좋아졌어요," he said, or something like that.) I'd love to take the doc's word as very good news, but he seemed to have no answers for why I might be experiencing angina. Otherwise, he too noted the improvement in my blood pressure, but he said I need to keep working on it. Now, "improvement" with BP is relative: your BP tends to fluctuate almost from minute to minute, and I had some super-low days leading up to today's appointments: on January 7 and 8, I was 89/70 and 99/78 (according to my home kit, anyway). If anything, today was a bad day.
Anyway, the diabetes doc won't see me for another four months, and the cardiac doc scheduled my next appointment for six months from now—in the summertime. So I'll be back to separate visits, I guess. This might get awkward for this year's walk along the Four Rivers trail. I'll have to tell the docs about the future. Of course, there's a chance I might end up teaching at a university in some town other than Seoul, in which case I might not even be going to Samsung Hospital anymore. (I'll have to find a local hospital or clinic if I do move.)
Otherwise, that was today's visit to the hospital. Nothing but good news from the docs, but I'm not sure how much I trust it. Persuading the cardiac doc to give me an echocardiogram last year was like pulling teeth, and I sometimes get the sense that, in his joviality, he's a little too dismissive of my concerns. I suppose I could have another heart attack and, boy, won't that show 'im! Frankly, I'd rather not have another heart attack or stroke: a second one of either would likely kill me. But having been through both now, I think the real nightmare would be to survive either one and be a half-vegetable with brain damage. No more blogging, no more coherence, no life to speak of, and not even able to take care of myself. So my hope is that, if I should have a second stroke or heart attack, it wipes me out completely, leaving only a fat, bloated corpse. To anyone reading this (and this is in my holographic will as well): I want to be cremated within a day or two of my death. Scatter me wherever, or flush me down a toilet like in "Captain Fantastic." Trust me: I won't care.
And now, I'm beat. I'm not sure how much work I'm going to get done today, I might just rest and watch a movie or two. I got some Subway sandwiches for lunch and dinner, today being a day of celebration. Then back to the discipline this weekend. Salads, here I come.
I understand the skepticism, but good news is better than bad news. So that was good to hear.
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