Saturday, October 11, 2014

Shuffling Pills

My doctors have been adjusting my medications on a weekly basis. What's driving it is the results of blood and urine tests plus my blood pressure. One doctor says increase this pill from once a day to twice a day. Another doctor says to decrease that pill to once a day. Still another instructs me to take still another pill once every day except Tuesday and Friday, and these other ones Monday, Wednesday, Thursday, Saturday and Sunday. Adding to the confusion is that some pills need to be taken with food while others are to be on an empty stomach. Two pills have to be cut in half because the drug manufacturers don't make them in the dosages that I've been prescribed...and they're really hard to cut. One is so tiny I can barely see it, the other is hard as a nail and tends to shatter when I try to cut it. I end up taking different combinations of over a dozen different pills five times a day. Keeping track of all the pills is really a challenge, especially when the doctors keep changing the combinations.

I think the thing that annoys me the most is that my original complaint that got me into all of this medical nightmare STILL hasn't been addressed. I talked to my family physician about it in February...pain in my hip and groin. He sent me to another doctor who ordered a CT scan and sent me to another one who ordered an MRI.  Both scans revealed the kidney cancer. That's where everyone dropped the ball on my pain. All attention turned to the cancer. My continuing complaints of hip and groin pain have been effectively ignored. I understand that the urgency of addressing the cancer problem, but the pain has steadily increased. In February it was an occasional pain. Eight months later it's to the point that I hurt every time I stand up or sit down. If I shift in my chair more than a couple of inches it hurts, and about every four or five steps when I'm walking. I'm planning a trip to my chiropractor next week to see if he can help me. My only problem with that is my health insurance will only authorize twelve visits a year. Typically the chiropractor wants to do an adjustment about every day for a week or two, which burns through the authorized visits pretty quickly.