HealthyConcerns.com

Tomorrow is World AIDS Day

Denise at BlogHer reminds us all that tomorrow, December 1st, is World AIDS day.

She urges us all to

Get Involved
Get Informed

And she also urges us to get intimate with some folks who blog regularly about AIDS.

And yes, she provides all the link to do all of the above.

You may be like me; the annual death of friends may have slowed; you may feel like the problem has subsided. But globally this is still as massive killer and is destroying communities. That's worth remembering.

Why we don't go to doctors, or at least why I don't

So yesterday my Thanksgiving started with a bang. I went to get up from our somewhat dilapidated couch at about 1PM to start getting ready to go to my brother's house for Thanksgiving, and something went very wrong in my back.

Now, I've had a marginal back for years and years, since I was in a car accident at 17. I'm used to the sort of ongoing, chronic (and transient) pain that one learns to live with pretty well. But I've never "thrown my back out" in that stereotypical way you see on TV when someone bends over and then grips their lower back in agony. But yesterday when getting up I suddenly felt something very wrong in my back, not my lower back, but the lower center portion of my trapezius muscle on the left side. I tried to have my S.O. rub it, but that just made it worse. It was like every way I tried to move was initiating a stabbing pain. To make matters worse, taking a deep breath initiated a stabbing pain too. So, of course, that meant that I immediately felt like there was nothing I needed more than to take deep breaths, but I couldn't, so I started to get a little panicky hyper-ventilating thing going on.

I laid on the ground for a while, and was pretty convinced I might have to skip Thanksgiving. Eventually the S.O. got me two Aleve, a glass of water and a bag of frozen peas from the freezer, and I lay in bed with that bag under my back while he took his shower. I also started doing some minor stretches and trying to test my range of motion with my arm. By the time he got out of the shower I decided I could suck it up and go to Thanksgiving. The hot shower seemed to help a bit. (The whole heat vs. ice thing remains unclear to me.)

It was fine, pretty much. I did take some more painkiller about six hours after I'd taken the first batch. I fell asleep fine last night, although I woke up early in the morning and had some difficulty finding a comfortable position. And that is still true. I don't seem to have the stabbing pain problem, but it's still uncomfortable to breathe deeply, and my whole left side from the base of my neck down my mid-back feels stiff and uncomfortable, and like if I moved the wrong way it would feel very bad indeed.

So, do I plan to go to the doctor? No, I don't. I was thinking about that this morning and wondering why it just didn't even occur to me to go to the doctor, and this is what I came up with:

1. Time: Not that Kaiser has ever been terribly disrespectful of my time, but I just envision a holiday weekend with holiday staffing levels and holiday mishaps and feel sure this would be time-consuming. Particularly because I wonder if they would make me see a primary care physician before referring me to a whatever-kind-of-doctor-looks-at back. (A call to the appointment line would answer this, of course.)

2. Money: What would all of this cost? I have confessed before that I find my plan a little confusing. I think I'm only going to owe a small co-pay, and I end up getting charged $150. Again, I could pull out my paperwork and figure this out, but I start weighing whether any time or money is worth it, given that I believe...

3. ...that in the end there won't be much they can do. Seriously, what else are the going to tell me besides take a painkiller/anti-inflammatory, put ice on it, rest? Stuff I can do without them. OK, maybe they'd give me a stronger painkiller/anti-inflammatory, which wouldn't suck, but like so many random medical mishaps, this seems like a "time heals" situation. (And a quick scan of Kaiser's web site entry on back injuries seems to confirm this guess on my part.)

Of course, this is the same thought process that prevented me from going to the doctor when I was sick at the beginning of this year...until a month or two later I had to go and discovered I had a raging sinus infection.

This is the same thought process that many people probably go through every time somethings feels wrong, even those like me with health insurance. Imagine the thought process for those without health insurance.

Two questions:

1. Does it matter? Is it in fact good for us all to think twice before availing ourselves of medical assistance? Does this prevent overloading the system with unnecessary patients? Or do too many people end up with escalated conditions that could have been prevented, had they simply gotten checked out earlier? Who's got the stats on that?

2. If it matters is it purely the responsibility of the patients to be more proactive and take better care of themselves, or should we be thinking about the system and how it might be changed to make it less time-consuming, expensive and more hospitable to potential patients?

I don't think I really need to go to the dr. this time. But will I make the right call the next time I really should go?

How do you make the call?

How do I post this without sounding like I'm saying "I told you so"?

Steak-eating contributes to breast cancer.

As a long-time vegetarian, now vegan, I can tell you unequivocally that I did not make either of those dietary choices for my own health. It's why I rarely talk about it here at HealthyConcerns. (I do talk a lot about making that vegetarian to vegan transition here.

BUt it is certainly a nice side benefit knowing this key excerpt from a recent study:

The study of more than 90,000 women found that the more red meat the women consumed in their 20s, 30s and 40s, the greater their risk for developing breast cancer fueled by hormones in the next 12 years. Those who consumed the most red meat had nearly twice the risk of those who ate red meat infrequently.

I have eaten exactly no red meat since I was 24 years old. So this news sounds pretty good to me.

So, tell me carnivorous red meat eaters...does news like this give you pause? I ask because news like the fact that vegans can sometimes suffer from B12 deficiencies (though that's easily solved) doesn't really give me pause. So, I'm assuming the same sense of blithe disregard would apply to those who are happy with their dietary choices in the opposite direction. Is that true? Or would you change your habits based on more information (adding to that already well-known) about the health risks associated with meat-eating?

My eyes, my eyes!

I have worn contact lenses for my entire adult life. I've gone through phases where I don't wear them as often, but let's just say that I have 25 years of contact lens experience under my belt.

Friday night, for the second time within a few months, I scatched my eye.

In case you're wondering, yes, I have long well-manicured nails...and have had them since 1994, so I guess I've suddenly lost my ability to function with them?

The first time I did this it was while taking out the contact. They're soft, disposable lenses, so I do have to stick my thumb and pointer in my eye and sort of squeeze that baby out. Sometimes if my eyes are dry it's more difficult than other times, but I just wet my fingers and that helps. A few months ago I just felt pain as I did my usual thing, and it did indeed feel like i had scratched the surface of my eye with the side of nail.

On Friday night i could feel I had something in my contact for about an hour before I got home and took it out...and again the pain upon removing the contact was way worse than the irritation I'd been feeling.

What are the enduring symptoms once you've done this? For me it's been: real, live pain, excessive tearing up, extreme sensitivity to light. And yesterday a period where I felt somewhat dizzy...probably because I'd been walking around with one eye closed.

According to both Web MD and Healthline searches the treatment seems pretty basic: use eye drops, take pain-killers, rest the eye. (I don't suppose blogging counts as resting my eye.)

Like so many other ailments, in the end, you really just have to let your body heal itself. So difficult in this instant gratification world, isn't it?

And i think I have to carry around my glasses or an extra pair of contacts, so I can remove a contact the second something is obviously embedded under there...and take a lot mroe care when removing my contacts.

Kaiser's little problem

Yikes! Did you hear the one about how a Kaiser employee decided to share with about 180K fellow employees the rather stunning projection that Kaiser will lose 7 billion dollars over the next couple years? [Original source: SF Chronicle]

Kaiser employee Justin Deal says he wanted to jump start the company's efforts to eliminate waste. He considers himself a sort of internal whistleblower and can't understand why on earth he's be put on administrative leave.

Really?

I wonder what other steps he took before deciding a mass email to all employees was part of the solution?

I guess I could hear more of the story, but this reminds me of those stories about people getting "fired for blogging." In most, not all, cases, thsoe employees were actually fired for doing something stupid. The blog was just the channel.

Without more info indicating the contrary I'd have to say this sounds like one of those cases.