QuietThrill of Celeste
Jan. 19th, 2022 09:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ismoThe Sparrowhawk continues to convalesce. This morning he said "My throat hardly hurts at all!" and eventually, he even went out in the living room and played the piano for awhile. I spent some time arranging for flowers to be sent to Ms. Science, in honor of her mother's recent death. I found a cool local place not far from their neighborhood that just seemed like their aesthetic. But yesterday when I tried, they had closed early. Today I got through to them and ordered flowers sight unseen. Finger crossed they will be nice! Ordering stuff on the phone like this is supposed to be so easy, but it never is! Then I didn't really have time to go for a walk, but I put on my boots and went out for a quick one anyway. I really needed to get out of the house. It was 22 degrees, not all that cold, but there was a biting wind with snow flurries, and it felt freezing! I wrapped my giant woolly scarf around my face a couple of times. There was really nothing to see, because the birds and everybody were staying out of the wind. I did see one old lady with a mask on, getting out of a car in the nuns' parking lot. I waved to her, and she said, "I can't see a thing! My glasses are steamed up!" She probably thought I was someone she knew.
Then I worked on my Barsoom project a bit. I cooked dinner for the first time in days. I've been living on leftovers and salad, while the Sparrowhawk has been eating mostly soup. He was actually able to eat. So when he started looking for cookies, and there weren't any, I decided to make him some of those too--chocolate chip. "Let them cool? Why would I do that?" he said. He put half a still-molten cookie in his mouth and said around the edges of it, "I'm living in paradise."
So now I'm going to indulge in a boring discussion of medical quirks, and anyone who is bored by that kind of thing should check out now. Back in 2011-ish, my doctor put me on a new blood pressure med, lisinopril. I promptly developed a horrible cough that went on and on for an entire year. I soon realized it was not the flu. My doctor put me through every possible specialist. One of them was the gastroenterologist, who made me drink barium, put me on a tilt-a-whirl table and spun me around, and concluded I had a hiatal hernia. Which I do. So, he then concluded that my cough MUST be caused by gastric reflux, even though I assured him that I'd never been troubled with heartburn. He prescribed omeprazole anyway--a proton pump inhibitor. The cough didn't quit. He said "Oh, well, you can take more. Just increase the dose." It never apparently occurred to anyone that what I had was a cough induced by the lisinopril, which by then was a well-known side effect of ACE inhibitors. Finally, I discovered this on the internet and took myself off the lisinopril. Like magic, the cough ended. I was pretty mad about this whole thing. But I kept on taking the PPI, because hey, I still had the hiatal hernia.
I tried to quit it once or twice, but when I quit taking it, THEN I had heartburn. So I'd go back on it. But I kept reading about the possible bad effects of taking PPIs for a lifetime. So, when I ran out of the pills, and the pharmacy was taking such a long time to refill the prescription, I thought I'd give quitting another try. By this time, I had learned that apparently it is well-known by doctors that quitting a PPI is very difficult. The medication actually causes your body to secrete MORE of a gastric hormone that increases stomach acid, AND to make the cells that secrete acid proliferate in your stomach lining. Your body is trying very hard to overcome the medication and make stomach acid, because that's what it knows how to do. So, if you didn't have heartburn before you started taking it--as I did not--you WILL have it when you quit. They don't bother to tell you that because, as one article said, "It's not clinically significant." Well, pfui, it's significant to ME. It can take anywhere from three weeks to four months for things to normalize, so they say.
The first week was MISERY. I seriously questioned my decision. I had to take other types of antacid a couple of times. The second week was a little better. I'm on week three now, and it's almost kinda normal, provided I'm very careful about what I eat when. I'm cautiously optimistic. I think it's also interesting that I haven't had any of the attacks of stomach/gut pain that had become so troublesome. We'll see. I should also mention that the last time I had an endoscopy--for that stomach pain, which the doctors also could not figure out--they said the hiatal hernia was smaller than originally diagnosed. So that's nice to know. I am a complex system; also a work in progress.
Then I worked on my Barsoom project a bit. I cooked dinner for the first time in days. I've been living on leftovers and salad, while the Sparrowhawk has been eating mostly soup. He was actually able to eat. So when he started looking for cookies, and there weren't any, I decided to make him some of those too--chocolate chip. "Let them cool? Why would I do that?" he said. He put half a still-molten cookie in his mouth and said around the edges of it, "I'm living in paradise."
So now I'm going to indulge in a boring discussion of medical quirks, and anyone who is bored by that kind of thing should check out now. Back in 2011-ish, my doctor put me on a new blood pressure med, lisinopril. I promptly developed a horrible cough that went on and on for an entire year. I soon realized it was not the flu. My doctor put me through every possible specialist. One of them was the gastroenterologist, who made me drink barium, put me on a tilt-a-whirl table and spun me around, and concluded I had a hiatal hernia. Which I do. So, he then concluded that my cough MUST be caused by gastric reflux, even though I assured him that I'd never been troubled with heartburn. He prescribed omeprazole anyway--a proton pump inhibitor. The cough didn't quit. He said "Oh, well, you can take more. Just increase the dose." It never apparently occurred to anyone that what I had was a cough induced by the lisinopril, which by then was a well-known side effect of ACE inhibitors. Finally, I discovered this on the internet and took myself off the lisinopril. Like magic, the cough ended. I was pretty mad about this whole thing. But I kept on taking the PPI, because hey, I still had the hiatal hernia.
I tried to quit it once or twice, but when I quit taking it, THEN I had heartburn. So I'd go back on it. But I kept reading about the possible bad effects of taking PPIs for a lifetime. So, when I ran out of the pills, and the pharmacy was taking such a long time to refill the prescription, I thought I'd give quitting another try. By this time, I had learned that apparently it is well-known by doctors that quitting a PPI is very difficult. The medication actually causes your body to secrete MORE of a gastric hormone that increases stomach acid, AND to make the cells that secrete acid proliferate in your stomach lining. Your body is trying very hard to overcome the medication and make stomach acid, because that's what it knows how to do. So, if you didn't have heartburn before you started taking it--as I did not--you WILL have it when you quit. They don't bother to tell you that because, as one article said, "It's not clinically significant." Well, pfui, it's significant to ME. It can take anywhere from three weeks to four months for things to normalize, so they say.
The first week was MISERY. I seriously questioned my decision. I had to take other types of antacid a couple of times. The second week was a little better. I'm on week three now, and it's almost kinda normal, provided I'm very careful about what I eat when. I'm cautiously optimistic. I think it's also interesting that I haven't had any of the attacks of stomach/gut pain that had become so troublesome. We'll see. I should also mention that the last time I had an endoscopy--for that stomach pain, which the doctors also could not figure out--they said the hiatal hernia was smaller than originally diagnosed. So that's nice to know. I am a complex system; also a work in progress.
today's word is
Date: 2022-01-20 10:06 am (UTC)doctors hardly ever use it.
i hope you will regain your gastric equilibrium with a quickness.
no subject
Date: 2022-01-20 01:38 pm (UTC)Long story of similar ilk: My doctor, a few years ago, insisted on putting me on a statin because of my new diagnosis of type 2 diabetes, because even though my cholesterol was normal now, I was at risk in the future. When I finally had another appointment, my blood sugar had gone up and my muscles hurt all the time. I thought it was from not exercising during lockdown, partly because lockdown and partly because pain. I then learned this statin can increase your blood sugar (even the FDA says so!). Which is BAD. It can actually make diabetes worse. Also muscle pain is a known side effect. I took myself off and everything improved, including my blood sugar. I did not tell my doctor to do her damned research, I just said I stopped taking the statin because exercise outweighed (hah!) any potential cholesterol issue, and the statin made me hurt. I had to remind her of this again recently, but given pandemic, I forgive her for forgetting what I said.
I wonder OFTEN if my mother's increasingly bad diabetes was exacerbated by the statins she was on. I'll never know, but she died at 63.
no subject
Date: 2022-01-22 05:44 pm (UTC)This SF Bay Area native burst out laughing. Girrrl, I would curl up and die if I had to go out in that.
Best wishes with getting past the heartburn. I have reflux and it's nasty.