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…but my father is in the hospital in Missouri with what, at last pass by various specialists, looks like it might be a heart defect. They’re supposed to be running tests today.

He feels a lot better than when he went into the ER on Saturday night, but they want to keep him for at least several more days, probably, to run tests. The hematologist who was brought in yesterday does not think his problem is Factor V Leiden (my clotting disorder), although there is evidence of (long) past clot-related damage. They did an EKG that came back clean, but apparently the possible defect is of the sort that wouldn’t show up on an EKG anyway.

This is interesting, because I actually complained about chest pains to my GP last year and got an EKG of my own. She was basically humoring me; she kept telling me that I probably just couldn’t tell the difference between chest pains and muscle aches from weight-lifting, which I found insulting, but the EKG came back clean, so despite the fact that I’ve had these pains intermittently at least since college I figured it couldn’t be that bad.* I guess if Dad has a Super Sekrit heart defect I’ll need to get rechecked.

My mother was not too happy when I mentioned this.

“You had CHEST PAINS and you never MENTIONED them to me?”
“Gee, I wonder why… The EKG was fine! They said I was fine! I feel fine!”

Mom called to update me just as I was leaving the grocery store; I arrived home to discover a letter from the UW Benefits Office, forwarded from Boston, informing me that they were canceling my health insurance effective TODAY because the premiums had not been paid. This should definitely not have happened, since the standard practice is to take the entire summer’s premiums out of the May check for grad students who have a fall appointment, which I do, but apparently–the benefits office returned my frantic voicemail at 6:35 this morning–nobody authorized this for me. No one really knows why.** They’re supposed to call me back either this afternoon or tomorrow morning.

I strongly hope that there are no further difficulties in resolving this, since I may need to get a freaking cardiologist when I get back to Madison. Not to mention a new GP–even if I don’t have a heart defect, this is also the woman who told me that I should never, under any circumstances, consume more than one alcoholic beverage in a 24-hour period and then strongly implied that I was an alcoholic. It was like she’d never seen a graduate student before.

The good news: my honorary nieceling Abby, who is almost 5 and who fell down a flight of stairs this weekend and suffered a fractured skull and subdural bleeding, has just been discharged from the children’s medical center in St. Louis. They have a follow-up appointment next month and a list of symptoms for which to keep an eye out, but this morning’s CAT scan showed that the injury has started healing (it was a long slow bleed, which is why they kept them for three days). Abby is very relieved that they will not be shaving her head for surgery and apparently is enjoying telling people that she broke her first bone: her skull.

Despite having been confined to a hospital bed, Abby never really showed many symptoms (it’s a good thing my friend Laura, her mother, took her to the ER, obviously), and she was definitely getting pretty bored. Laura said that last night she pressed the call button to summon a nurse and then demanded that her Care Bear’s blood pressure be checked. In case you were wondering, a Care Bear’s systolic BP should be under 50. Bedtime Bear is a healthy 35.

I hope they actually figure out what’s wrong with Dad today.

—

*You’d think I’d have known better by then. Constant vigilance, that’s how you have to deal with the medical profession.

**Although let’s just say that this is not the first benefits SNAFU that I have experienced through my department in the past couple of years.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 31st, 2007 at 12:42 pm and is filed under children, bodies, medical drama, friends, family, links. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.