Medical paranoia

[vanillafluffy]

I'm on my way out the door, but wanted to share this---in an email to a friend, I wrote:

"It seems to me that once you go to a doctor, they will *find* something wrong to keep you coming back. Pretty soon, you have a condition---or two or three---and you're having tests and more tests and all kinds of drug interactions and you go from being a little achy from your original complaint to hurting from some procedure or other. Maybe it's fatalistic of me, but dying quietly at home sounds a helluva lot better to me than winding up on tubes in a hospital somewhere while being ravaged by drug-resistant strep that I picked up while I was in there getting poked for something that wasn't bothering me until some doctor decided it was a big fat hairy freakin' deal. (/rant)"

To which she responded, "Tell me how you REALLY feel!"

I know, there are a lot of conditions that don't manifest outward symptoms until a late stage. And the older you get, the liklier they become. But geez Louise, I've seen the constant-tests-and-a-boatload-of-meds scenario, and I don't want to go down THAT road, either.

OR the road to Melbourne, but I gotta....

Comments

[ang5fam.livejournal.com]

I have the veins, too, on one leg.
Don't wear shorts out of the house anymore because my leg looks so bad- don't wear dresses, either. They are all over the bottom of my right leg. Younger sis is only 36 and she already has them, too. Our Mom has them,

[vanillafluffy.livejournal.com]

Ah, shorts. There was a mandatory dress code of shorts for gym class at my elementary school. I hated it, and that, combined with my general body-image insecurities meant that after my 8th grade graduation, I didn't wear shorts again for decades. Then, oh, about 10 years ago, something snapped. I said, I don't care if I look like the Pillsbury doughboy's girlfriend on vacation, it's too damn hot for long pants. I don't wear Daisy Dukes---I'm not completely crazy---but a few good pairs of bermudas? You betcha!

Kind of the same story with dresses---got traumatized at St John's, only wore them for church for quite a while---but that was partly because my school daze coincided with the era of miniskirts, and with my height and weight, finding dresses was a nightmare. These days, skirts and dresses are a vital part of my wardrobe, because they're cooler than jeans, more forgiving to my figure, and more...I hesitate to say more ladylike, because it sounds like my mother, but me in a dress vs my coworkers in jeans? I win!