danceswchopstck replied to your post
Oct. 6th, 2017 01:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dragonlady7via http://ift.tt/2hUT4XO:danceswchopstck replied to your post “salamanderinspace: I think if there is only one piece of advice I…”
God DAMN but I wish we had decent universal Healthcare! I had eczema for years, and now *haven’t* had it for years, but the route from one to the other involved a LOT of allergist visits and shots, plus some tests and some serious changes in what I eat. If you’re ever in a position to want details, let me know, OK?
Man, eczema flares are things I can minimize but never be free of. Every time I have sought treatment I’ve been told to avoid getting the affected area wet, and use cortisone creams until it clears up, and I’ve learned by trial and error that it’s far more important to moisturize with completely pure things like almond oil or lard and avoid sun. I had eczema between my fingers for years that tormented me (and actually led to me getting a MRSA infection because the skin was broken) until it eventually went away. Now it’s the insides of my elbows, and my wrist if I wear a watch, which, I like wearing a watch, so. But it’s a lot easier to keep those areas dry.
And every doctor has presented it as: that’s it. You can come back and complain but I’ll just give you the same thing. That’s just a thing. It can’t be cured, only avoided. No one has ever suggested that I might have an allergy. They’ve mentioned that asthma and eczema are linked in that they’re inflammatory immune system responses, but that’s the farthest anyone’s ever gone.
And I always figured it was my fault, because I can barely remember to take a once-a-day medication; I can’t do two inhalers a day for asthma, I just can’t, and trying to use a medicated cream twice a day just didn’t happen. I can keep it up for a day. So if I can’t keep up with the doses of medicine they give me, then clearly, I don’t deserve to get better.
Now, as to why I can’t keep my shit together more than a day at a time even for something as immediately beneficial as not having bleeding wounds on my skin, that’s also something doctors have never been interested in, but I have a suspicion maybe I should seek out some kind of attention-deficit or executive function disorder kind of diagnosis. I asked my doctor, and once was shot down, and then asked another doctor and he said oh yes you could get evaluated for that, ask the receptionist for a phone number, and I got literally a piece of paper with a phone number on it that I didn’t know what the phone number was for, so clearly I never called it. (I had, by the way, mentioned that I had a total inability to make phone calls, but clearly, the doctor was uninterested in that. I had chosen this doctor, by the way, because he was apparently super into holistic medicine, and by that he meant treating the whole person, and really getting down to the root of the problem, and not just treating the symptom. Well, he’d need to have had more than four minutes to spend on me for that to work, and he just plain didn’t, so. So much for that.)
Anyway I’m pretty resigned; my problems are obviously Too Vague For Doctors To Care About, so I’ll just keep them to myself. That’s not what our healthcare system is for anyway.
I can completely understand why my uncle, knowing he was sick, decided it was probably just easier to die of cancer at home than go have a doctor try to figure it out. He waited until he was dying to get checked out, and then did so. Very cost-effective and time-efficient. I mean, we’re still grieving, years later, but at least he didn’t waste some doctor’s time.
God DAMN but I wish we had decent universal Healthcare! I had eczema for years, and now *haven’t* had it for years, but the route from one to the other involved a LOT of allergist visits and shots, plus some tests and some serious changes in what I eat. If you’re ever in a position to want details, let me know, OK?
Man, eczema flares are things I can minimize but never be free of. Every time I have sought treatment I’ve been told to avoid getting the affected area wet, and use cortisone creams until it clears up, and I’ve learned by trial and error that it’s far more important to moisturize with completely pure things like almond oil or lard and avoid sun. I had eczema between my fingers for years that tormented me (and actually led to me getting a MRSA infection because the skin was broken) until it eventually went away. Now it’s the insides of my elbows, and my wrist if I wear a watch, which, I like wearing a watch, so. But it’s a lot easier to keep those areas dry.
And every doctor has presented it as: that’s it. You can come back and complain but I’ll just give you the same thing. That’s just a thing. It can’t be cured, only avoided. No one has ever suggested that I might have an allergy. They’ve mentioned that asthma and eczema are linked in that they’re inflammatory immune system responses, but that’s the farthest anyone’s ever gone.
And I always figured it was my fault, because I can barely remember to take a once-a-day medication; I can’t do two inhalers a day for asthma, I just can’t, and trying to use a medicated cream twice a day just didn’t happen. I can keep it up for a day. So if I can’t keep up with the doses of medicine they give me, then clearly, I don’t deserve to get better.
Now, as to why I can’t keep my shit together more than a day at a time even for something as immediately beneficial as not having bleeding wounds on my skin, that’s also something doctors have never been interested in, but I have a suspicion maybe I should seek out some kind of attention-deficit or executive function disorder kind of diagnosis. I asked my doctor, and once was shot down, and then asked another doctor and he said oh yes you could get evaluated for that, ask the receptionist for a phone number, and I got literally a piece of paper with a phone number on it that I didn’t know what the phone number was for, so clearly I never called it. (I had, by the way, mentioned that I had a total inability to make phone calls, but clearly, the doctor was uninterested in that. I had chosen this doctor, by the way, because he was apparently super into holistic medicine, and by that he meant treating the whole person, and really getting down to the root of the problem, and not just treating the symptom. Well, he’d need to have had more than four minutes to spend on me for that to work, and he just plain didn’t, so. So much for that.)
Anyway I’m pretty resigned; my problems are obviously Too Vague For Doctors To Care About, so I’ll just keep them to myself. That’s not what our healthcare system is for anyway.
I can completely understand why my uncle, knowing he was sick, decided it was probably just easier to die of cancer at home than go have a doctor try to figure it out. He waited until he was dying to get checked out, and then did so. Very cost-effective and time-efficient. I mean, we’re still grieving, years later, but at least he didn’t waste some doctor’s time.
