Findings At the Doctor's Visit

I went to this new doctor with the lowest expectations possible. I was thinking, she will probably call me a druggy, crazy, in the need of taking some meds! I set myself up for the worst possible doctor visit ever. I am happy to say that yesterday went fantastic! This time I decided to go to a D.O. A D.O is a doctor who isn't completely blindsided by handing out prescriptions in hopes to stop specific symptoms. Typically D.O's are more involved in the "whole body" and they try to help their patients prevent problems before they happen by evaluating a family's background and risk factors. You'd think this would be common sense, but most M.D's don't care. There are exceptions (of course), but most of them just hear your list of symptoms and hand out a pill (s).

The visit was much better than expected. She is very concerned about my health and I could see it in her eye when she felt the lymph nodes. I think she was scared... There are enlarged lymph nodes near my collarbone and further up on my neck. I told her that I haven't been "sick" for a LONG time, so we are forgoing antibiotics that may take care of a lingering illness. I had a bunch of blood work done yesterday.

• CBC (Complete Blood Count)
  
• ESR (Erythrocyte sedimentation rate)
• TSH (Thyroid-stimulating hormone)
• T4 (Thyroxine)
• CMP (Comprehensive Metabolic Panel)
  
• CMV (Cytomegalovirus) Titre

I repeated a few of them because I didn't want to deal with getting the results from Goldstein's office. Sometimes his office is REALLY difficult to work with especially something like this. They don't know how to use a fax machine...They won't even call you with results! That is totally up to you and they always sound very annoyed by it. I have never seen a doctor that doesn't call immediately as results come in.

CBC, I am curious to see how the results compare to Goldstein's.

ESR will show any inflammation in the body. Many months ago I had a C-Reactive Protein checked and it was very low, so we'll see what happens with the ESR.

TSH and T4 are thyroid markers, which I expect to come back completely normal.

CMP is a whole list of things including liver tests. Once again, I didn't want to deal with getting results from Goldstein's office. It's just too frustrating for me to handle. I still can't understand why Goldstein would order a BMP and a liver enzyme test...A CMP does all of that in one.

CMV Titre. I don't know how accurate this is going to be since I already had EBV when I was 16/17. I told her this so I'm not sure what she is looking for. From what I've read it's very difficult to interpret the results if someone has already been exposed to one of the viruses. Part of me is concerned that she will blame everything on EBV is this comes back high. Let's hope she has an open mind!

I am just glad that I finally found someone who listened to me and went ahead and felt my neck for swollen lymph nodes. She felt lymph nodes that I had no idea were enlarged. The ones she said were enlargde usually indicate something very very bad like metastatic cancer or lymphoma. However this is only the first step and I'll probably need referred to an ENT to do a biopsy if they deem necessary. I'd at least want a PET or CT-scan to check everything out.