01.19.08
Western medicine
Western medicine is amazingly good in some ways. They can sometimes cure things you didn’t even know were wrong with you.
The docs discovered my mom’s PMP on a CAT scan they did looking at what they think was diverticulitis, an annoying but generally easy to treat disease. I believe that she is totally recovered thanks to that early diagnosis. Me, I went to the doctor because I had a bump on my arm, and they ended up checking me out for cancer. (It wasn’t, but it could have been.)
I went to the doctor for three pretty innocuous things. I might not have gone if there were only one, but three together pushed me over some sort of tipping point.
- The most important thing was that a bump on my arm — which the docs had told me was fine but to keep an eye on — looked different. The skin around it was peeling slightly.
- One was that my urine output didn’t seem as “forceful” as it should. My brother-in-law had had fibroids in his urinary tract, and the thought crossed my mind that I might have something similar.
- The last one was so trivial that I honestly can’t remember what it was.
They said my bump was infected slightly. They said that when the infection died down, they could take it off if I wanted. I did and they did.
They seemed far more interested in my urine output, and that ended up causing a cascade of diagnostic tests which culminated in them taking out a polyp six weeks ago. While it turned out to be nothing, there was a non-zero chance that it could have been cancer, where early detection probably would have saved my life.
And that underperforming urine stream? That thing which seemed too trivial for a visit to the doctor on its own? It got robust again all on its own.
I am just astounded at how random life is. In only a slightly different version of the universe, I could be saying, “A bump on my arm saved my life.”
