No guarantees
Today I had to leave the apartment early for a mammogram. This is a third one I've had in the last five+ years and I hate them. The first one was so hard on me that my entire chest was bruised for months.
That first time they found a tumor in my left breast, which had me in the back room looking at the film of the affected breast with a worried doctor. I have to admit that I was too tired to even worry about breast cancer. I just wanted to go home and curl up because I hurt so badly.
The end of that experience was I had a lumpectomy and the tumor was benign. So I'm glad I didn't get too much of my emotions involved even though one doctor thought I would have to get a mastectomy. The only souvenir I have from this 2005 experiment is a huge scar on my left breast. Nowadays it is white and I hardly remember its there.
At least today we have gone from a regular mammogram machine with two steel plates to a 3D mammogram machine. The use of plastic in the machine has made the squashing of the breast less painful.
So there are no guarantees that I will be tumor-free. I suspect I'll be fine.
The reason I am now having to do all of these procedures is that UMC in Las Vegas Nevada wants to put me on the kidney transplant list. They sent me a huge list of things to do. Thankfully, I did not have to do another colonoscopy. Doing one of those is worse than having a mammogram.
Getting anything done in medical during the pandemic and post-pandemic is hard. When I had to see the gynecologist (for the list), she got me in within days. Normally she wouldn't be able to see me for 30-90 days. I know folks in the apartment complex who can't get a specialist in less than 30 days. I am fortunate because they slip me in early.
I wish sometimes there was a guarantee for good health. I lived forty years with only a few infections and viruses until I reached 41. Then my life feel apart. I started with red eyes with purple irises. Then my kidneys failed and I ended up in the hospital for almost four weeks. It was in a German hospital that I was diagnosed with Wegener's Granulomatosis. They found the granulomas (crescent-shaped scars) on my left kidney through a biopsy.
I think sometimes that even when I am in pain, I consider it mild to medium because when you have pain in every joint from kidney failure (toxins seems to go to the joints), there is no pain afterwards that can even touch the pain of those first few days.
So there is no guarantees that I will be healthy enough to get a kidney. There is no guarantee that I will stay healthy. I learned that when I suddenly became so ill that my nurse thought I would die that night when my kidneys failed the first time.
The only guarantee that I have is that I won't get out of this life alive.