The Results
It’s been a rough morning, fuck, rough week, but today has been a little more trying.
Three months ago I got some bad blood work results. They were so bad in fact that I drastically changed my diet and lifestyle. If I don’t make it myself, I don’t eat it. Subway and oatmeal are the exceptions to this. But it sounds like a work lunch on Friday will also be another exception.
So in that 3 months I’ve lost 35 pounds, documented every carb, fat gram, calorie, and protein that I’ve taken in, cut beer down to one beer a month + one during the Superbowl, I make EVERY meal myself from scratch (except the above mentions) and even create my own recipes (because I hate following the recipes of others unless baking), and can now do ~40 pushups/20 crunches/the stairs at work from 3rd to 11, and all the other exercise each day (unless I wake up and say “fuck it”).
I ate dinner at 3pm on Sunday so that I could fast for more blood work on Monday morning to see how I’m doing after three months. The doctor also ran a series of other tests, and congratulated me on losing the weight but told me I’m not completely out of the woods yet. And he said to come back in on Wednesday to get blood results.
I’ve been absolutely slammed this week, I was unable to head in yesterday for results, so I called. They told me the doctor would call me back that night. No call of course last night from the doc. I hadn’t had my hopes up so it was fine.
He calls this morning while I’m on the phone with a client, I tell her I’ll call her back, and take his call. He starts going off on my about how bad my blood results really are, and how I need to cut out all flour and sugar from my diet. And I told him how I don’t eat anything processed, EXCEPT for the wheat bread on the veggie sub I get from Subway. He says I need to join Weight Watchers and start documenting what I eat so I can see where my carbs are coming from (cause he was telling me how high my triglycerides were).
I told him I’m not joining a self help group, and that if all of that hard work I put in, and the 3 months of research I’ve done haven’t paid off, then NOTHING WILL, and that I’m going to just do whatever the hell I want, because it obviously (aside from weight loss) hasn’t made a difference. He tells me that my triglycerides are in the 380s. Normally they don’t want them to be higher than ~200. He tells me that my LDL is fine, but my HDL is too low, and my total cholesterol is over 200, but that since I lost so much weight he didn’t want to make a big deal out of cholesterol, just triglycerides.
He then kept bitching at me for about five minutes in total, and told me he could tell I was getting frustrated. I said I wasn’t frustrated, I was downright pissed off. He then says he needs to get back to patients, and tells me to calm down and do research and track what I’m eating so that I can find out where all the sugar and flour is coming from. He tells me to come in and get a copy of my results. We hang up.
At this point, I was so pissed off and defeated at the same time that I was pretty much in a fury. I was to the point of throwing everything off my desk and walking out without telling anyone why. I’m sure when my coworkers asked what happened, the one cube neighbor within earshot would tell them that he heard me in an argument on the phone just before it happened. I tried to calm myself down, I tried to apply some good old fashioned buddhist teachings to it, but I just couldn’t calm down. Everything I attempted only seemed to make me angrier.
That’s when I tried Siri, she has a walk of talking me in from the ledge. she’s been also going through a lifestyle/fitness/health change, and like me, she’s been tracking everything online and exercising each day, and always seems to be able to throw a positive spin on my issues. I told her what he said and she flipped out and started yelling via IM about how there was no way in hell that my doctor was right. And then started telling me that if all that work didn’t change anything, then something was severely wrong with me that he hadn’t identified, and that I needed to find another doctor willing to look.
Then the cell phone rang again.
I saw it was my doctor, and I answered the phone with “What now?”
He started laughing and started out with “You are gonna kill me [laughs] but I messed up, and I want to apologize to you. I’m sorry. [laughs]”
“WHAT?”
He then tells me how he started writing down his analysis of my blood work in my records when he noticed the date on the blood work. It was then that he realized he was reading the wrong blood work. So he realized he needed to call me back as soon as possible. And he said on my CURRENT blood results, my triglycerides were 190. That’s when I said “I want to fucking smack you. If you were hear right now I’d have punched you. Do you realize how pissed off I was from that first call?” He apologized over and over, and told me to keep up the good work, and that he still wants me to come back in in three more months for more blood work to see how I’m progressing.
I thanked him for calling back, and told him how I’m glad he did because I was in a fury after the first call and about to go on a rampage. He apologized again and then reminded me to come in and get my blood work. He then tells me that my cholesterol is good too, and again apologizes. I thank him again for calling back and we hang up.
I then emailed him and apologized for cussing to/at him on the phone.
I’m sure my blood pressure was through the roof after that first call (which is why I started going to the doctor in the first place). I went outside and started screaming and yelling then called Siri and told her about the follow up call. It’s been almost an hour now since that and I still haven’t come down from that adrenaline high I’m on.
Who needs soap operas with a life like this?
