A Christmas Catastrophe: How Getting Lost in the Medical System Strains My Sanity And Hurts My Care

A day in the life of an angry advocate:

I barely slept last night because of endometriosis cramps. They assaulted me early this month and that’ll make Christmas harder thanks to the painsomnia.

I called to cancel an appointment with my GP today as result. Brain fog and pain flares don’t result in productive meetings. We were supposed to talk about lowering and re-organizing my medications because I am about to start fertility treatments. I want to find the safest possible combination at the lowest reasonable dose.

Shouldn’t this be done by my pain specialist?

You’d think. But I get shuffled between my GP, OB, Pain specialist, and fertility doctors instead. No one seems to want to pre-plan with me. I still don’t know who to call or what I would do if my pain spiked or my insomnia made me entirely sleepless during pregnancy.

My pain specialist has been busy focusing on nerve blocks vs nerve ablations for my pelvic pain. That’s important. But he keeps deferring the medication chat until the next appointment. Which is always months away.

He’s too busy.

To make matters better, I’m playing broken telephone with the pain clinic office. They gave me an appointment time to follow up from an October nerve procedure but apparently never scheduled it. When I called to confirm and found there was no appointment, they told me the next availability was in six weeks. Great.

Then I realized not only would the medication chat happen too late, but if I waited to book my next nerve block until the Jan 21 appointment, then the procedure would have to wait until the spring because his schedule would already be full by then.

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So I talked to the pain nurse earlier this week and asked to get the nerve block on the books asap. Two days later I got a call saying a completely different procedure (nerve ablation) was booked for Jan 22.

Are you for real?!? So I wrote an email to him sharing the results of the last procedure and all of my questions and thoughts since that’s the only follow-up from my surgery I’m apparently going to get.

I called my OB-GYN for help. She told me to contact Mother Risk (“an information service providing up-to-date information about the risk and safety of medications and other exposures during pregnancy and breastfeeding”).

I’ve already done that. 3 times. But I have yet to sit down with a doctor to discuss their advice.

MotherRisk says it’s unlikely my medications will cause birth defects. As a result – and I’m not making this up my OBGYN and nurse practitioner asked, in that case, WHY I WOULD WANT TO TRY LOWERING MY MEDICATIONS?

Are you f&*!ing kidding me?

Because the less I take the better? Because if one is slightly safer than another, I’d rather take more of that and less of the other? Also, similar organizations to Mother Risk in the US and UK do identify increased risks with two of my medications!

To top things off- Surprise!- my period came two weeks early. I’m having a normal 30 day cycle for the first time in a year. My usual 44-day cycle is how I got my PCOS diagnosis. So now I am beginning fertility drugs just in time for Christmas, with all the joyous side effects.