Day 3 – Getting healthy

I will be 45 this May and my body has been letting me know it for several years. It’s a cliché - the aches and pains come, but they don’t always go away. I am a generally healthy guy, and thank god for that, but the fender benders and delayed oil changes are really piling up.

The diagnosis

My first big health scare came more than 16 years ago in Spring of 1996 when I was getting ready to come over to Eastern Europe after getting my MBA at NYU. I had to get a number of basic tests for the entry visa including things like a TB prick, a basic chest x-ray, and the dreaded AIDs test. I vividly remember the absolutely horrifying process of receiving my results. My student insurance covered me for the downtown NYC public clinic as opposed to the cushy, suburban clinic I visited growing up (where all the doctors played golf on the weekends and summered in Nantucket). Let’s just say I wasn’t used to US healthcare for the 99%.

The first indication that there was a problem came from a message left on my answering machine (how 90s!) . . . . “Mr. Mac-Daniel. Dis is da clinic callin.  We got ya’ll tess back. You need to be callin  us back,  at-cha eh-liest con-veen-yance. Thank ya now. Click.” Calling back was a nauseating exercise in futility. “Who dis callin’?” “Wach-ya name agin?” “Wha-cha need sir?” “Hol-on-a-minute . . . “. After 10 times on hold I trucked on down to the clinic. The aids test was fine, but my x-ray wasn’t. So I decided I better finagle an appointment at the cushy clinic where my parents lived. There the “more specialized” doctor told me I either had malignant lymphoma or sarcoidosis but it’s really hard to tell unless we biopsy some granular lymphonytes from the anterior cul de sac (or some such nonsense an MBA wouldn’t even understand). After some more horrific nail biting and paranoia it was clearly decided (by an even more specialized specialist) and explained that it was 99.3% certain I had sarcoidosis, and not to worry at this point, but wait and see if it goes away and check up on it in a year.

Well I checked up on it about 5 years later by which time I has a lump on my neck the size of a large marble that again brought about concerns of lymphoma. And this was when my mother was battling lung cancer so that didn’t really make it so easy for any of us. The result was that to battle the sarcoidosis (which I let linger way too long) I needed to go on a regime of very strong corticoid steroids, for which I promptly gained 50 pounds and never quite lost. Even worse, the sarcoidosis came out of remission and I had to go through another round (gaining another 50 pounds, topping me out at about 260, having seesawed from 185 to 235 back to 210 up to 260. Currently at 215, but that’s for another post). The condition is chronic and incurable but if managed is not very serious. Long term can be very serious, and if not managed can be deadly from complications such as pneumonia and other problems with organs, although that does not seem likely for my case.

I need to get tested regularly (which I usually don’t) and am now overdue. While this is probably my biggest health issue, others are also reoccurring, chronic, and I suspect interrelated somehow. The list:

o   sarcoidosis

o   thyroid nodules

o   obesity / overweight

o   gout

o   high blood pressure

o   problem with joints

o   warts

o   borderline OCD (anger, paranoia, freak outs, panic attacks, impulsivity)

o   Cavities (still!)

Note on Sarcoidosis: This is an increasingly common ‘rare’ disease, historically more prevalent in African Americans. Doctors really don’t understand it and there is no cure. It is an auto-immune disease, affecting organs and causing swelling. Typically the lungs are affected first but it can affect heart, liver, eyes and brain. Doctors suspect that is comes from airborne particles in the external environment – hence why lungs are affected first – but no one will tell you that because it’s not proven. Most people deal with it easily and it is not serious but some, including actor and comedian Bernie Mac, have died from it. ( http://abcnews.go.com/Health/story?id=5589149&page=1 )