Mushroom and emmental fritatta with salad and sourdough baguette
Today started badly: I didn’t sleep well, so really, really didn’t want to get up this morning. But mum needed painkillers, Suki needed telling she had had breakfast and could take it or leave it, and I was expecting a call from the doctor about the message I sent them yesterday about mum’s miscellaneous pains, so up I got.
Around mid-morning I received a phone call from the doctor, to tell me that the neurology consultant had got back to him about mum’s headaches. The consultant wants mum to stop taking the cocodamol painkillers and the propanalol she was prescribed, and start taking a different prophylaxis instead.
I said that was fine as long as the new tablets don’t conflict with mum’s other medications (“err… I don’t think so?” was the not exactly reassuring response), but what about the message I sent yesterday suggesting a processing issue as a cause for mum’s various pains1? “You could be right, but that’s not something I can help with. Someone else will call you later.”
If there’s one thing that frustrates me above all with advocating for myself and mum, it’s the way medical specialists refuse to speak to each other and instead leave it to the patient / carer.
I’m still getting requests to go to the GP surgery for a blood test to test how my condition is responding to the changed meds. But I don’t have an original baseline result to compare it with, because this specific type of test has to be done within 30 minutes of the blood being taken but no-one told my GP that when I went in for the original test. By the time they found out, I had started taking the new meds: I sent a message to my consultant asking if I should arrange for a trip to the hospital to have the blood test anyway, but he never responded.
My original consultant, who no longer has any role in my care, did respond, several weeks later, with a somewhat snotty note that the GP surgery should do a better job of informing their patients of requirements for tests. I asked the GP surgery to communicate with my consultant, but – back to where this diversion started – they said that was down to me.
I still haven’t managed to get a response, so still don’t know if I should be doing anything about the monthly reminders.
The same (lack of) logic applies to my antidepressants: the GP took me off sertraline at the request of the consultant (after I asked twice, anyway: the first GP I spoke to said it wasn’t something he could help with2) but said he was reluctant to start me on the suggested replacement as he didn’t think I needed them. My current looping flares of temper / tears / despair suggest otherwise, but also mean I am lacking the energy to argue my case.
I never did get a call from anyone else at the GP surgery, BTW, so tomorrow I will have to chase them up and ask if there’s someone I can speak to who can help. I wouldn’t dispose of the NHS for any reason – at least all this advocating and chasing and will-someone-please-talk-to-me-ing doesn’t come with a rest-of-life debt – but it is mentally and physically exhausting, at a time when the last thing I need is any more causes of exhaustion.
On the plus side, Suki has been in the mood for snuggles multiple times throughout the day. A current favourite is what I refer to as ‘the Suki sweep’, where she collapses at my feet while I rub her cheeks, which slides her across the floor until I can no longer reach. (Go go gadget arms! echoes from childhood tv.) She gets up, moves closer, and we start again.
For dinner I made a mushroom and emmental fritatta, which was OK: I think I needed to cook the mushrooms for longer, to get a proper depth of flavour. Mum ate half a crusty baguette (Tesco Finest longlife sourdough seeded baguettes, which are a fantastic cupboard standby), proving (at least to me) that her teeth are fine and it really is a processing issue causing the pain. Not that that makes any difference to mum, of course – pain is pain, no matter where it comes from – but might give a doctor something to go on in helping mum feel better.
If I ever get to speak to anyone, of course.
Tonight, though, is dogs on tv (The Dog House) and that weird sensation of something hitting me on the leg, which sometimes is just a weird sensation, and sometimes is Suki’s tail.
Everything else is tomorrow’s problem.
- My suspicion is hyperalagesia, where the brain starts interpreting mild stimuli as agonisingly painful. It doesn’t mean the pain isn’t real, just that the cause is neurological rather than physical. ↩︎
- Yes, the same GP that said the same about my request for advice on mum’s pain issues. Nice guy, but not exactly proactive. ↩︎
Is it pineapple sponge today? 