It would be hypocritical of me to not speak about the issues that surround me everyday. For those who have lived with me, (S/o to Isabella for always being so kind) they have experienced first hand what it means when I wake up with a migraine, and it is everything but pretty.
Imagine waking up to a construction site drilling into your head behind your eye. That's pretty much what I can sum my migraines down to. It's a construction worker looking to earn overtime by continuously drilling into my head and not stopping until he earns his bonus. It gets worse by the minute, and unless you have some real strong medication, theres no way that migraine is going away.
I've had migraines for as long as I can remember. I remember living in my mom's old apartment and constantly having "headaches" that would escalate to the point where I refused to leave my dark room and wouldn't eat for hours. Migraines come with special gifts. Sometimes nausea, other times vomiting, always painful. I've had several MRI's, electroencephalograms, among other procedures done to try and link my migraines to anything other than genetics. So far, my neurologist has found nothing, and the diagnosis remains the same. I am a patient of Chronic Migraine.
This is no surprise considering my mother suffers from the same thing. Her grandmother also suffered from Chronic Migraine, so it was only a matter of time before me or my sister started developing this awful life sentence. Thankfully, my sister has, to this day, never suffered from a severe migraine (and I hope to God she never does), so I was the only one who inherited this bad gene and now I find myself frequently looking for remedies everywhere. Whether its prescription medication, homeopathic drops, CBD drops (this is fairly recent, I have yet to try other derivatives), years on beta-blockers, nothing has really made my migraines better.
To further complicate things, I present my neurologist, Dr. Angel Chinea, specialist in MS and Migraines. I have seen him only once at his office... at 9:30pm in the evening (with other people still at his office waiting). Don't get me wrong, Dr. Chinea, his secretaries and staff are WONDERFUL and I could not recommend him more, but for that he has thousands of patients, a waitlist, and its always a real lottery to find an appointment. Today is May 8th, 2018, I called his office and asked for an appointment (I'm moving to PR in one week!!) and his first available was... wait for it...... June 28th.
I can't say I wasn't surprised. That wait time is usually what doctors in DC tell you when you tell them that you're on "the university healthcare insurer," but I never had this problem in PR. Speaking from a position of privilege, since my Dad is also a doctor who has many doctor friends who have always been very accommodating, this was the first time I encountered a wait time that was this long. I say privilege not as a mean of bragging, but as a reality that I need to embrace. I cannot continue telling my story without adding that part into the "equation" because that would mean I'm omitting essential information from the context.
Anyhow, I was surprised but not upset, as anyone who knows me might think. I was not upset because as my previous blog post On Infections and Healthcare explained, I am constantly sick. I am visiting hospitals everywhere around the world, and if I've learned something valuable is that you must always stick to the doctors who know you. To make a long story short, last year I fractured a finger (yes, watching the Champions League final at a Beer Garten.... but thats not the point) and went to GWU Hospital to seek treatment and all they gave me was a [improper] splint and some narcotics and sent me home. Upon arriving back to the island, my Orthopedic Surgeon took an x-ray of my hand and say that not only had the finger not healed, but it was not almost impossible to repair. The hospital had given me an incorrect diagnosis and, more importantly, an incorrect splint that only made my hand stiffer. Now, my finger looks like something out of the Goonies.
The bottom line with this entire blurb is that I prefer to wait until June 28th than to rush to another doctor who might not even have the slightest idea of how to treat me and start from 0. I prefer greatly for Dr. Chinea to evaluate me first, since he has already worked with me than to just look for a "quick fix". I've experienced first hand what "quick fixes" can end up doing, and they are costly, they also have waiting times and damn, they can end up pretty and ugly, if I may add. My point here is not to steer you away from seeing new doctors but to consider what wait times can actually mean. Will they mean you have to wait a sh*t ton at an office? Yup. Will you be pissed off by the second hour you're sitting in the same chair? Yup. Will you want to kill yourself when theres two turns before you and they STILL. DONT. CALL. YOU??? Yes and yes. But the whole reason you are waiting is because you want to receive undivided, personalized, and more importantly proper care. In my opinion, that invalidates any downfall of having to wait in an office (or just wait almost 2 months to even come to the office).