How Not To Get A Date

So there's quite a lot of catching-up to do, given that I have been a bad pituitary blogger for the past month and a half and yet quite a few highly relevant things have happened, including meeting with the neurosurgeon and Ear Nose and Throat people (who are apparently more properly called Otolaryngologists - who knew?) and finally getting a date for surgery. I shall start at the very beginning...

At the beginning of November, my next injection was due. You probably know by now that I need monthly injections of lanreotide, a somatostatin analogue, to suppress the overproduction of thyroid stimulating hormone by my pituitary tumour. These injections are delivered into my hip via the medium of a really big needle. It's so big I'm pretty sure a camel actually could pass through it.*

One of the nurses greeted me when I arrived, took my bloods and then went to get the injection. Then something happened which had never happened before.

"Would you like any freezing spray?" she asked me.

I was nonplussed. Previously, I had always associated freezing spray with childhood trips to the Irish seaside, not hospitals. I had to ask what it was.

"Oh, it's just a spray which freezes the skin before an injection," the nurse explained.

Those who know me well will know that one of the few things I like less than injections is being cold. "Sounds unpleasant," I said.

"Yes, it's quite painful," the nurse said breezily. "But some patients still prefer it."

Now at this point, I admit perhaps I should have smelled a rat. No other nurse had ever offered me freezing spray prior to one of these injections. But I wasn't worried.

Like a fool.

Most nurses, when they do this injection, hold the needle (did I mention it's massive?) against your skin and then gently press it in. Not this nurse. Instead, she opted to hold the needle some distance away from the injection site, then take a great swing and stab me with it. It was considerably more painful than usual, and I bled a lot more than normal as well.

I can see why her patients usually ask for freeze spray.

So, I promptly became the proud owner of an excitingly multi-coloured hip bruise, which lasted for three weeks before finally fading just before I was due the next injection. I actually did try to take a photo to show you all but it just came out as a blurry smoosh. For a couple of days I couldn't even lie in bed on that side without wincing.

Anyway, that anecdote was by way of being an aperitif to the main cock-up that I encountered on that trip to the hospital. While my hip was bleeding gently, one of the endocrine nurses asked if I'd heard
anything from the Neurosurgery or Ear Nose & Throat departments, who were supposed to be getting in touch with me about my impending surgery. I explained that I'd still heard nothing and that despite my attempts to call them I'd never got through to speak to an actual human being, and they'd never returned any of my messages. The nurse went off, had a look at her computer, and returned to tell me that I'd had an appointment with ENT. On the 26th October. Which was four days previously.

I also had an appointment booked in on the 5th November with Neurosurgery which I knew nothing about, and ENT had written to me to rearrange my missed appointment for the 6th November.

They'd been writing to my old address.

I still don't have the faintest idea how it happened. As soon as I moved house, I duly phoned the hospital and updated them with my new address. Not long afterwards, I received an appointment from the MRI Department at my new house. I sighed a deep sigh of relief in the happy knowledge
that my details had been successfully updated... and it never occurred to me that they might be sending appointments to my old address.

Obviously I am also slightly put out at my former housemates, who knew I was going to have surgery and who I'd asked to forward on any hospital-looking letters, or even just let me know if they arrived so that I could drop by to pick them up. But how the hospital could get it right... and then revert to getting it wrong, I have no idea. It's not the first time it's happened, either - avid readers will recall that information about a ream of tests I had to have in July was sent to my old address despite the fact that I'd not lived there in four months and all my other letters had gone through correctly.

So obviously, I was very upset about this. I had been doing everything I could to find out
about my appointments, and no-one ever got back to me. You have to wonder how many appointments I would have had to miss before anyone bothered to do so.

__________________________________

* Hell yeah, I'm cultured.

IMFW: Headache? Painkiller!

If television advertising has taught me one thing over the past few years, it's that headaches are evil red pulsating blobs inside your head, and that if you have one, you can cure it with NUROFEN and that NUROFEN will heal all your achy ills and NUROFEN PLUS is there for when you have an exceptional amount of pain that needs to be killed, because humans are WEAK and liable to developing red pulsating headblobs at any moment.

I think that advert was for Nurofen, anyway...

If actual real life has taught me anything, it's that you should go to the doctor if you have headaches regularly, and also that being allergic to paracetamol is annoying if you're then put on medication which means you can't take aspirin or ibuprofen.

If the BBC has taught me anything this week, it's that painkillers can actually cause headaches, which I had no idea about. We all know you should be careful not to OD on paracetamol (but did you know that paracetamol is actually the commonest drug overdose in the UK, and accounts for a massive 48% of all poisoning admissions to hospital?), yet in fact even at non-toxic doses painkillers can cause what are known as medication overuse headaches. NICE has recently issued new guidance to health professionals in England and Wales on the subject.

If headaches get worse after a couple of months of regular use of painkillers, it's possible that they have developed into medication overuse headaches, and unfortunately the only cure is to go cold turkey and see if they improve - but at first they'll get worse. Also known as rebound headaches, they can be a serious problem, often occurring in people who already suffer from migraine or other chronic headache conditions, and who may have no idea that they're taking painkillers too frequently.

One Year Post Brain Surgery!

This is just a very quick post in case I don't have the time to write something more extensive today (quite possible, I am super busy!) to say - today is the one year anniversary of my transphennoidal pituitary surgery! A year ago right now, I was waking up in the hospital. At first it was pretty painful but I don't really remember that - I just remember being asked to rate the pain on a scale of 1-10 and spending several moments agonising (literally) about exactly what the range should constitute, then deciding on a five. Which was the right decision, because I got a whole bunch of morphine for my troubles. After that for the most part I didn't need much pain relief beyond paracetemol.

They wheeled me up to the ward after a while and I was outraged not to find my parents waiting for me, so I sent them a demanding text message insisting they come and see me (turns out they were not ever actually told that I had gone for surgery... that's another story) and was generally surprisingly perky for the rest of the evening thanks to a combination of steroids and morphine. Whoop! Also incredibly thirsty.

But anyhow that was a YEAR ago, which really is pretty hard to believe! My pituitary adenoma was significantly diminished after its encounter with my neurosurgeons... and now I'm waiting to find out how it looks one year on.

Headache? Brain Tumour!

So I thought maybe I should write a post about the pituitary tumour headaches that I get. As I have almost certainly complained previously, for many years I never got headaches and then, gradually, I started having them more frequently. Every now and again, right after taking a couple of ibuprofen,* I would entertain the vague thought that maybe I should go to the doctor and get it checked out... and then laugh at myself for being melodramatic. Oops.

Because the thing is, they never happened that frequently. Maybe once every few weeks. I was under the vague soap opera impression that tumours in your head  gave you headaches continously, but apparently this is not necessarily the case! After my operation, I had headaches more frequently for a month or two (not particularly surprising given that surgeons had been rummaging around in there with sharpened implements), maybe a couple of times a week.**

My pituitary adenoma headaches are actually usually pretty similar. Previously, I would get pain all around the edge of my right eye socket, and right at the back of my eye - and it is somewhat disconcerting to feel where your eyeball must be - although since the surgery, it has improved (yay!) - I only really get it in the upper left-hand corner of my eye, which is where the pain used to be worst. I always feel slightly better if I massage that corner of my eyebrow; this has now turned into a habit which I catch myself doing even when my head is not hurting.

But ladies and gents of the internet - fret not if your headache sounds similar, for you probably do not have a tumour in your head (though that does not mean that your headache could not be seriously unfortunate). The Power of The Internet informs me that there are all sorts of different types of headaches even amongst pituitary tumour patients, so pfft, who knows. Just go hassle your doctor about it.

________________________________________________________
* Paracetemol makes me cough. Apparently this is odd.

** I wasn't allowed to take ibuprofen due to being on steroids, and I wasn't supposed to cough lots, which ruled out paracetemol. This put me in something of a quandry for painkillers, but as they didn't tend to last too long I am INCREDIBLY BRAVE, I just did without.