Health Problems

Yeah I don't think the government that has provided me with almost free cure to a deadly disease might appreciate that :/

pharmakos said:

I just did high-dose chemotherapy with an autologous stem cell transplant in August, for my stubborn stage 3C seminoma (testicular cancer). Was in there for 22 days. Spent probably 16-20 hours a day just sleeping. Didn't eat any solid food for like the last 10 days of it.

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I had relatively easy time on my transplant. One night of sorta high fever, few days of just not eating and 3 weeks of runny shit (ongoing). Sleepy all the time from meds but managed to keep myself from spending my time in the bed and sat reading silly shit like the politics thread. Worst weeks I've had with the cancer were back in august and september when I was getting high dosages cytostatics every week, I got a bunch of cool side effects like an acute allergic reaction that covered the whole body in hives. I am sort of lucky as my disease is ALL, the "childrens" leukemia (80% of patients), treatments weren't that intense but my body still took offense to most of em.

pharmakos said:

I've heard of adults getting that form of leukemia actually staying in the childrens ward for their chemo, did you?

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Nah just a regular hematologic sections in the hospital, first a regular one and then last month a wing just for transplants (no room sharing etc). Kids I think have their own hospital next door, I did have a 15 year-old roommate for a day that had had the cancer for 3 years already and was waiting for a transplant, they move them to "adult" wing at 15 I think. My age (33) allowed the doctors to give me kids treatment, the limit is like 40 and for some reason after that you get the shittier one.

a_skeleton_03 said:

The daughter has lyme disease and it sucks. She has been on antibiotics for a month now that make her feel shitty but when she comes off them it's worse so she just can't win.

Stupid tick got her a few months ago and we saw no rash and she had no fever.

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I know you said you were doing a keto diet. I have heard a low/no carb diet mixed with a few days of fasting can speed the recovery of Lyme. I believe Tim Ferris tried it and said it worked when nothing else seemed to make a difference. If it wasn't Tim, then it was at least talked about on his podcast.

I realize pro-keto is as bad as crossfit and vegans, but thought I would throw it out there for you for some research. And if you are already familiar with it, it might make for an easier transition to the diet.

a_skeleton_03 said:

We will give it a shot and it makes sense.

Her issues are leg muscle pain and some headaches.

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Then get the straight DXM from CVS. Stay away from cough syrups and other combination products. Should be 30mg gel tabs available in a small bottle. Its plastic cased hanging on a rack, not in a box.

I got one beautiful tick to the back of the head in New England around age 6-7 that was growing for quite a while and was discovered only accidentally. I was never treated for lyme (typical useless do-nothing doctors) and I can probably attribute a few chronic health problems to it. Little stuff like that is when I realized I had to step up and take a more proactive role in my own treatments.

Hey @Synj I had the talk with my doctor today. Got the blood work done, so next time I see him I am going to push for the butt pellets.

aychamo_aycono said:

Let me ask you all something. What would you pay (monthly) to have 24/7 access to your doctor? Email/Skype/Text? Lets say for simple problems you just call or skype or text, and for big shit the doctor comes sees you at your house or work, and for worse than that you go to the ER. And for labwork you would goto a lab and get negotiated, discounted rates. And how would you feel if there were caps? Like after you initiated communication, say, 5 times in a month there would be another fee (this is to kind of throttle the high maintenance patient).

I just imagine a patient would enjoy that, "Hey I have a bad cold, these are my symptoms" and they can send all the meds to the pharmacy for you. Or "I need birth control refilled" or "I'm due for my adderall refill, everything is fine" and they ask a few questions and then send it in for you. Just curious as a patient what you would expect and what you would value it at.

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My employer pays something pretty similar called Teladoc. You can call / email / text symptoms and you chat with a doctor. You can send pics or video or do live video chat as needed. I've only used it once when my daughter got a rash all over her body late at night. Was super convenient to get a medical opinion without waiting at urgent care all night. We just sent pictures of the rash then chatted on the phone a bit. They were able to also provide prescriptions but we didn't end up needing anything.

I don't know how much I'd value it if that came out of pocket. No co-pays and convenience factor (no waiting, no travel) made the experience pretty great. Maybe 10-20 bucks a month? My family is fairly healthy but it'd still be nice to have that indicate access to a pediatrician for situations like the one above. I'm sure something like this will become more mainstream at some point as the younger generation grows up. The majority of my family's doctor visits (injury, checkups, prenatal, etc) still need to be done in person but I'd love a service like this to be rolled into standard insurance plans with a discount to convince people not to rush to urgent care or the ER every time they get a cold.

So the short answer is that the service itself is a great idea, but getting myself or others to pay a lot for it on top of standard health insurance is a tough sell since you'll definitely still need both.

pharmakos said:

Well, had my biopsy yesterday, no results til the end of the week probably.

Had my six month check-up scheduled for today, we all forgot to cancel it (went in early because I was complaining about pain). I went anyway since I hadn't had my serum tumor markers checked in a long time, and so I could pick the doctor's brain a bit.

It's pretty much unheard of for testicular cancer to spread to the lymph nodes, so we've been going thus far on the belief that it's probably a non-cancerous tumor called an adrenal adenoma.

My bloodwork today, tho, did not look good. My LDH only is slightly elevated, but my betaHCG went from 1 last time to 26 this time.

So yeah, still a lot of question marks, but that news today about my tumor markers being elevated hit me like a bag of bricks.

My doctor is concerned enough that she's already scheduled a PET scan in February, didn't even want to wait until we officially got the biopsy results back. Doesn't seem like a good sign to me.

What if Lumi is right?

If I have to go through chemotherapy again I might just kill myself first instead.

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Keep your head up man. We're all just a bunch of fags on the forum but I do truly hope it all works out for you.