F*ck1n9 doctors!
July 29th, 2010Just listen a second to what’s been happening to Karen since last year.
Early last year, doctors found out that Karen has arthritis in the knee. It made her suffer a little, but she could do most things other people do.
Beginning of this year, we went to Morzine for New Year. Karen decided that she’d minimise her skiing efforts and joined us for two mornings. Once while falling over, she did hurt her left knee a bit, so she decided not to join us anymore.
Ever since then, that knee has been getting worse at rapid pace. End of April, she had a couple of days where walking was *really* difficult after sitting down for a long time. But things got a little better and in May we did a couple of nice walks together and went to London. It went really downhill from there, and by the time we got to St-Petersbourg for a long weekend, walking was getting more difficult, which was difficult because of how the city is laid out walking was a necessity. After St-Petersbourg, the downhill proceeded.
During last week, it took Karen on average two minutes to start walking after she sat down (or slept) before she could actually do something and start walking ( if you want to call that hobbling along walking ).
Before St-Petersbourg she’d seen her GP who told her that it’s just an inflammation caused by the arthritis for which she had to take pills (!). That inflammation has only gotten worse since, despite the medication. So we thought it was time for a specialist.
So this morning at 8:20 she had an appointment. At 8:40 she was already home! Specialist said that GP was right, that it’s not that bad (clearly not being able to walk properly isn’t dead threatening!), given her stronger pills (these pills make her nauseous and give her diarrhea). Knowing that hobbling (I’ll stop calling it walking) back from the hospital must have taken her at least 10 minutes, I realise that she’s been in there for far less than 10 minutes! Despite the fact that she was told the doctor could speak English, he was barely capable to, which makes me think that he just wanted to get rid of her as soon as possible! He told her to come back if inflammation doesn’t go away… despite the fact that it didn’t go away with pills previously. He also told her to do lots of exercise, knowing she can barely walk!
I’ve spent several hours with the physiotherapist at VUB when I was a swimmer, and if there’s one thing I remember that he said (his specialisation was knees): “There’s hardly anything that can be solved by merely pills, and if so, I can solve it in at least half of the time”. I’m afraid that if we don’t find a knee specialist who is prepared to properly listen, investigate and think of solutions (either to heal or alleviate pain), Karen will have a major depression. She’s a woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown now (and this is *not* an exaggeration).
