Thank you and Something Else

• by SMITTY
• 2007-10-11 06:10:24
• General Posting
• 1984 views
• 5 comments

Hello,

It’s me again. I have a leaning experience I want to pass on but first I have to say thank you so very much to all of you. I expected there would be a few people that would comment because you are familiar with my tales of woe, but the response has been truly overwhelming. I have to say you people surly know how to make an old man feel important. I’ll be glad when we can post pictures so that I can see a picture of all you very nice people.

Now th something else. I learned something the other day that I found surprising, yet it is something of which we all should be aware. That something is if we have a problem for which there seems to be no answer; you may want to consider that your problem may be one for a doctor who has specialized in another field of medicine and your current doctor may need a little help in determining this.

Now for this may be boring to 99% of you as it is a history of how I came to know about the sagging diaphragm.

In April ’07, my SOB was a real problem and I had to go to the ER. A number of cardiologists came by to poke, prod and ask questions. To each I said my major complaint is SOB and this trip to the ER was really prompted by an irregular heart beat and chest pain that was accompanying the SOB. Finally one of them said I think you need a stent and we will set you up for a cath and stent implant tomorrow morning. There was nothing surprising about this as I already had three stents with each of them following my complaint of SOB. So, the next day I got me a new stent and just like the one I had gotten in ’05, it did nothing for me. The other two stents, one in ’00 and one in ’02 were truly Godsends for my SOB. But like I said nothing good came from the last two.

Since then I have made countless trips to cardiologists, had numerous tests run, and wore a Holter monitor all revealing nothing significant. Then the subject of sleep apnea came up. I had none of the typical symptoms for sleep apnea except I was at least as tired when I got up each day as when I went to bed. The only thing really significant was the tiredness would get better after I had been up for several for hours. I don’t know if he is just a very good doctor, or if in desperation, but the current cardiologist handed me off to a pulmonologist to see if I had a sleep disorder.

To try and shorten this, he ran more tests, one even called a “sniff test” and I got to wear an O2 monitor taped to my finger one night to see if my blood O2 levels were getting low during the night. In the meantime he had gotten my records (this clinic has every thing computerized now) and he was able to get my x-rays from ’04 in about two minutes. Sure enough, there was the sagging diaphragm in ’04, which he said was not much, but would have gotten the attentions of most pulmonologist. And that is what got us to where we are now. I’ve been seeing cardiologists and this fellow is a pulmonologist.

What I started out to tell you, before I got sidetracked and told you how to build the watch before telling you the time, is my complaint of SOB was a normal symptom for people with heart disease. Because of my history of heart disease, it was not unusual for the cardiologist to look in every nook and cranny for a cause. When in actuality, “probably” the major cause of my problem for about three years was the sagging diaphragm. There are no medications for my problem, other than supplemental O2 and I’ve had that at home for more than 20 years. Even in ‘04, I would not have been a candidate for surgery so I guess I’m really not much worse off.

Old age do take its toll.

Smitty