I GOT THE SCRIPT FOR JIMMY'S TEST! He had Dr. Hill tonight, who's a woman. There's four doctors working out of this practice. Jimmy only saw Dr. Hill once...a few years ago when we first moved to Sicklerville. The doctor that poo-poo'd me, Dr. Levy, is no longer with their practice. Jimmy was due for some shots. I brought Jim with me, and when the doctor walked in I told her, "I need to talk to you about something without Jimmy here because I don't want him to get S-C-A-R-E-D." Thank God Jimmy isn't a good speller yet. So Jim took Jimmy outside for a little bit. Dr. Hill was a sweetheart...she didn't know much about pheos, so I had to educate her. The first thing I asked was, "What's the first thing you do when you get up in the morning?" And she said, "Pee", and I said, "EXACTLY!" I told her the story in 1000 words or less and when I got to the part about Jim going normally like the rest of us now she agreed that Jimmy should be tested. I had to tell her the name of the test. It's called the 24 hour urinary catacholamines and metanephrines test. She also gave me the names of two geneticists. I did a little research and found that the most likely gene mutation in someone who's had a functional paraganglioma in the neck (that's just another phrase to describe what Jim had) is a "germ-like mutation in SDHB, C, and D." I'd like to find out if Jim and Jimmy are carrying this thing. I also told Dr. Hill about how difficult it was to get Jim into an endocrinologist. She couldn't believe it. I told her that as a doctor, other doctors will give her courtesy, but the layperson gets BUPKIS.
Now that Jim's ordeal is winding down, we've been swapping some stories about each other's experience at Lahey that we can laugh about now, but were not funny at all at the time.
Jim's funny story: While having a bad reaction to the sleep-aid Ambien, he was convinced that the nurses were part of a military conspiracy. The military was apparently doing experiments in hospitals manufacturing t-shirts that made people cough, and Jim was one of their test subjects. He spent one full night trying to pull out all of his apparatus and escape the hospital. The nurses had to keep watching him, but luckily he never got fully unplugged and out of his room. It got so bad that the nurses turned the alarm on in his bed. They told him, "If you get out of bed, the alarm will go off. Why are you trying to get out of bed?" They stopped giving him Ambien after that.
My funny story: The night before Jim coded I had given him a couple of Listerine pocket pack strips because his breath was so bad. When we arrived at the hospital and he was bleeding out of his burst carotid artery, not only was I panicked because I was convinced he was dead, but I also thought I killed him by the caustic action of the Listerine pocket pack. I thought the Listerine had somehow seeped through the stitches in his mouth and pooled in his neck causing his carotid to be eaten away by mouthwash. And how would I explain to everyone that it was all my fault?
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