Feeling Not Quite Right

So, I am trying to figure out why deciding to see a doctor is such agony for me. The last four times I have seen doctors were all highly positive experiences for me. A few years ago when I broke my hip and the emergency room doctor via SKYPE told me I could try and heal without surgery and it worked!! That was great. I am forever grateful that I don't have pins and crap in my hip and that everything is just as new. (well, as new as a 68 year old hip can be).

Then there was the wonderful doc in Spain who said, yes my eardrum had burst, but I was fit as a fiddle. Good thing that because I was at the start of the Camino and Dr. Ron had already treated me for my infection. Then there was the doctor who changed my life in Ashland, Oregon when he was taking off a few skin things and asked me how I was doing. I had never met him before and almost said, "fine", what did he know? But instead I told him how grey everything was, how I hated winter, how hard it was to stay cheerful. He told me about how I seemed to be suffering from Seasonal Affective Disorder and should take precautions. I decided on the spot that until I was dying and confined to bed and maybe not even then, I was becoming a snow bird. Brilliant man.

Oh yes, the emergency room doc here in Nica last winter when I torqued my tendon. He gave me a drug to take down the swelling and it certainly did. He also told me I would be fine and I was.

All of these experiences over the past 3 years were distinctly positive. So, am I traumatized by a lifetime without health insurance? Now I have medicare but I don't understand it. Or am I afraid of the big bad diagnosis. Brain cancer, whatever. There is some of that. But there is also this business of having watched my parents go to doctors and each time come home with some medication that had ghastly side effects and led to the next medicine or the next specialist. I've known a few tough old birds who never went to the doctor and lived very long very healthy lives. And others, like my grandmother, who may have been helped some if they had had some medical attention. We'll never know. She hadn't had a doctor for anything in her life (like childbirth) so she wasn't going to bother him when she didn't feel well.

On my mother's side, Dr. Uniack spent much of his home visits with my mother having the priest come by. She had Scarlet Fever and Typhoid Fever and all the big childhood illnesses and was famous for her delirious fevers. Amazing.

So, I don't feel right. I came to Nica not quite feeling right. I don't know whether I had one thing and now have another, but I have decided that it is time to get some medical attention. So the great, the famous, the beloved by Grenadinos and ex-pats, Dr. Blanco is in Cuba. He is Cuban and has the nerve to return home for a visit just when I need him. Imagine! So I am going to another Cuban doctor tomorrow, fearful that I have pancreatic cancer or lung cancer, and equally fearful that I have to take a stool sample to a lab. I have never done that and it sounds horrid. One lady in town is reputed to have shit in a shoe box and taken the whole thing to the lab. I am not that thick.

I know that with the whole world suffering from one thing or another, this is dumb talk, but this is my little life and my little blog. Every time I try to function when I am not feeling up to snuff (great expression) I have so much sympathy for people who have the courage to live whole lives with diseases and injuries.

And for my holistic friends I have tried various teas and remedies. Not helping. I think the guy I am seeing id Dr. Iglesias. I think that means church. Full circle here. I need a faith healer. We all do.