Blood Rites

Today was busy busy busy.

Woke up this morning to a phone call from the Behavior Health office, to schedule my psychiatric exam.. Easy peasy, that's scheduled for next week.  Boom!!  One thing less off my check list.  Also called to get my COVID test scheduled for August 27th, as I have to have it done 4 days before they do the endoscopy/colonoscopy on Sept 1st.

After a few cups of coffee, I had a tele-visit with my primary care doctor.  Have I mentioned I absolutely love my PCM??  Talked to her about what went down with the surgeon and how she needed me to get a mammogram and an echocardiogram due to taking fen/phen in the 90s..  She put those in for me today, so we're all set there.  She also went over some information for her part of getting surgery approved for me - what "Co-mobidities" she was going to list.  The final list for my insurance is hypertension, hyperlipidemia, hypertriglyceridemia, joint pain (in regards to my knees), stress incontinence, GERD, sleep apnea, and pre-diabetes (although I am no longer pre-diabetic but have been listed as such in the past).  The insurance requires 1 comorbidity - I have 8 listed..  When I do something, I do it big I guess. 

After speaking with her and verifying that I could have my labwork drawn at the clinic's laboratory instead of having to drive off base to the hospital, I decided to go ahead and take care of the blood draw.  I needed to pick up a prescription refill anyway (fish oil that I take for cholesterol) so I figured I would just take care of it while I was there.  I needed a total of 11 labs run and I didn't now if I needed to fast for any of them and since I hadn't eaten yet, I figured it was the perfect time to take care of it.    

It took the guy a good 25 minutes to put in all the labs into the computer, and I think he was rather peeved about doing it (you'll understand why in a moment)..  After waiting for him to finish, he finally called me back and did the draw..  TEN VIALS!!!  I though having 3 vials was quite a bit, I never have seen so many vials of blood before..  Hopefully he left some in my body........  He allowed me to take a pic of all the vials after the draw, before he put the labels on them with my personal information.. All I can say is WOW!!

Now, here's why I think he was rather peeved about either having to put all that information into the computer, or maybe about having to do such a bit draw.  It was already a bit painful having the blood drawn - every time he swapped out the tubes, it pushed in past my vein and would jab my muscle.. Ten times of that sucked.. but then, when he pulled out the cannula, he managed to drag it across my forearm and gouged my skin, leaving a nice scratch. It arched across the top of my forearm, and then there's a second scratch on the side of my forearm.  OUCH!!  Dude didn't even appologize.

Hopefully that's the end of the blood work for a LONG time!!!

I was beyond ready to get out of there, but I went ahead and picked up my prescription and then dropped off the prescription for my colon prep.. It appears that the prescription for the Reglan wasn't included, so I will have to ask the surgeon's office for that prescription when I go for my next dietary appointment so I can get that as well..