Monday 19 June 2006

Pic of the day: Or perhaps they just did not live up to my miraculous expectations.

Doctor revisited

The last week I've had a worsening cough. This weekend it was particularly bad, and I started coughing up thick green phlegm at the end of the coughing fits. It certainly sounded like bronchitis to me, even though I had no fever. So in the morning I called the doctor's office. To my delight, I got an appointment the same day, at 2:15 PM. So far so good.

After calling the doctor, I coughed up even much more goo, and was breathing quite freely when I came there. Score one for the placebo effect, I guess. More about it another day, I hope. Anyway, I waited half an hour, had three blood samples taken, and waited half an hour more. The doctor looked at my larynx, listened to me breathe, and declared that there was no bronchitis sound. (Well, it wasn't then, but it was in the morning and evening.) The blood tests did not show any infection either. He thought the phlegm came from the upper respiratory tract. Well, perhaps it does. I don't know enough about anatomy to say for sure. But it is definitely accumulating in my bronchies while I sleep, so I wake up short of breath.

Instead, the doctor (again) took an interest in my breasts. I am among the minority of men who have breasts, although they are a bit small to deserve that name. Buds, you'd call them in a girl. I have had those since I was 13, when my body tried to become a woman but soon after had second thoughts and developed other parts of me instead. But just like last year, the buds obviously captivated my doctor (the same doctor as usual, yes) and he had to once again squeeze them and wanted to take a blood test for hormones. Do they get kickbacks for those or something? I reminded him that we took such a test last year, that I was sent to his buddy at the district hospital, who again sent me to a tomography, and I never heard from them again. This is usually a pretty good indication that it's fine. He looked up the records on his computer and found it as I had said. Easy for him to forget, he was not the one spending months wondering whether he had cancer.

The guy still wants a hormone test this summer, to see if there are any changes from last year. I strongly doubt it, since it's a long time since my puberty and nothing much has changed since. More's the pity. Perhaps I can convince him to prescribe estrogen so any body fat I accumulate henceforth can be stored in safer places than on my belly. It might even lower my sex drive, which can be nothing but a good thing... Nah, not likely. So why not just let sleeping hormones lie?

On the other hand, he also noticed a couple dubious birthmarks. One in particular is amazingly dark. Given my family history of malign melanoma, which eventually killed my mother, removing birthmarks seems like a prudent thing to do. So I got an appointment for July 5th, in the morning. At that point he promises to remove two of the spots, and I'll let him take the blood sample. If he squeezes my breasts again without warning, though... I need to learn to slap people without killing them. Evidently this is a needed skill for breast owners.

Tomorrow the cough will be back, only with yellow-green phlegm instead of green-brown. (I know this because it is already the day after tomorrow when I write this.) Perhaps it's time to look for a new doctor?