Functional medicine in 2020s

For the first time in 25 years, I LOVE my bed! I’ll never go back to foam or coil ever again. I’d consider an airbed if I couldn’t have a waterbed but never foam or coil. I wish I had thought to get one when we moved into our CH house.

We added more water and now it’s PERFECT! The sheets don’t bunch as much and it’s easier to change positions but still soft, like floating on a cloud. We both agreed not to add any more water because now they’re actually starting to look like tubes rather than these flat oblong things. There was hardly any room to burp the tubes before he closed them back up.

I didn’t realize it at the time but when I said they were 35 lb full, that was for a different brand and for tubes that run from side to side rather than from head to foot. These are about 50 or 60 pounds. The whole ensemble probably weighs about 400 pounds.

A new golf course was added; Venice, and it’s way cool. The course is very realistic and detailed and you can spend hours exploring every nook and cranny. We had fun riding the gondolas and going over and under bridges and whatnot. There were plenty of stores and cafes to browse through as well. Statues and waterfalls were scattered about.

The course itself is fun, too. The holes are challenging enough but not crazy challenging in any way like with the Lair series. Found half of the hidden balls so far but only a couple are pretty. Most of them are pretty dull-looking.

Back to being tired because I was up for 18 hours so I was glad my appointment was here at the house. The nurse called and asked if she could come by early. I said sure, and she arrived at 2:00. She was here for nearly an hour mostly asking me tons of questions. We went through my medical history and then she asked me short-term questions like if I’d recently experienced depression, anxiety, dizziness, fainting spells, etc. She took my blood pressure sitting down and standing up and of course it was high because it was one of those electronic cuffs I hate so much. She weighed me and listened to my heart and lungs and we went over my medications.

At one point we were talking about my ear and sleep disorder and it was funny because when I told her my ear was known as congenital “atresia” she looked it up on her phone and said all she was getting was alopecia. Lol, that’s because she was spelling it as atricia or something like that. I’m a little surprised she didn’t know how to spell it.

Not surprisingly, however, she’s never heard of the rare sleep disorder I have so I told her about it and she looked it up on her phone because we were talking about the two medications recently approved for it, one of which I won’t touch for fear of it causing the suicidal thoughts it can cause, and the one the insurance company won’t approve.

She said someone would call to discuss something called functional medicine. It’s funny too because she asked me to remember the words pen, light, and hamburger which I still remember yet twice she mentioned the name of this particular medicine and I couldn’t remember it till Tom did and told me what it was. He was sitting in the living room while we were in the kitchen, but he could hear everything.

I did tell her that my memory wasn’t what it used to be and even though it’s not a diagnostic tool, I took a quick online quiz last night that suggested I have mild dementia. I hope not! But it does run in my family. Anyway, the functional medicine people deal with things like sleep, menopause and hormonal issues. I told her I do have mild sleep apnea and a lot of fatigue. I don’t think it’s one culprit, though. The sleep disorder itself can cause fatigue since they always stress the importance of having a routine and a set schedule which I can’t have, of course. So sleep apnea, N24, and my age are all working against me.

We thought the funniest question she asked was if I ever had more than six drinks at once. Lol, I can’t imagine having more than two, and most of the time even that’s too much. When I drink it’s almost always just one glass of wine.

Another funny thing was that Tom was told that you know you’re getting old when you’re asked to draw a clock. She had me draw a clock with all its numbers and make hands saying it was 10 minutes after 11. He said this is to test to see if you’ve ever had a stroke. In one of the medical shows he watches, someone who had a stroke was asked to draw a clock and they put the first three numbers all on one side.

Anyway, we talked about past surgeries, and the fact that I’m up to date on mammograms and pap smears, and I also told her about the extensive heart testing I recently had.

She was very soft-spoken and the fucking dishwasher was running at the time. A part of me was tempted to jump up and open the door but I didn’t. I wouldn’t have run the thing if I knew she was going to come early. I was a little concerned there would be distracting barking and motorcycle revving but there wasn’t.

The only annoyance is up in the sky as usual. It’s been bad again with big planes, small planes, and helicopters. Can’t even go 5 or 10 minutes without hearing something up there so I run air cleaners or nature sounds to drown it out.

I don’t remember what I dreamed about last night but it seems the dreams were pretty neutral. Nothing good or bad. There’s no doubt that if I have nightmares, it’s a definite sign of trouble to come. If it wasn’t in such a bad way, I would be thrilled and feeling so gifted and lucky to be so psychic and have such a good accuracy rate but because this is anything but a gift, I definitely don’t feel lucky at all. All it does is prolong my misery, knowing something bad is coming and being unable to quit worrying and wondering what it might be until it happens.

She asked about living wills and DNRs, and we don’t care about wills since we don’t have any kids but I would still like to have a DNR on me. She said I could ask Rhonda about that. Yeah, I’m putting together a list of things to discuss with her when I see her in June. I told Tom that if I had Galileo still, I could get answers in minutes. “Yeah, you could get a different answer for the different doctors that responded,” he said.

He has a point there. That was the only thing I didn’t like about them.