A trip to the ATC
- 4 Jan 08, 3:51 PM
I had a bit of an accident on Tuesday evening dear Ouchers, you may remember me mentioning before that cutting ones toenails is a bit of a marathon effort for me, and involves bringing my foot right up to my face and praying that I don’t lose toes.
Well on Wednesday evening it was nearly a lot worse than that. I made the fatal mistake of attempting to use nail scissors instead of clippers. I managed to severely gash to top of my thumb and was left with a flap of skin hanging off and a deep cut.
As soon as I realised what I had done I made a dash for are bathroom; it’s the next room along from my bedroom so wasn’t to far to go, which was lucky as my thumb was pouring blood. I turned the corner ran in to our bathroom and nearly broke my neck! My dad had left the box for the Christmas tree in the doorway of the bathroom, why? I do not know!
Anyway all this resulted in a trip to my local accident treatment centre (ATC), because of the slice out of my thumb.
So I arrived and got seen really quickly by a nurse practitioner, then it came to the whole medical history bit and I was ready with all my various conditions and details of medications for each etc.
She was amazed ‘you have cataracts?’ ‘You didn’t have implants put in?’ ‘Why where you born with that then?’ ‘You have glaucoma?’… The questions continued.
I did my best to answer all these questions despite the blood pouring out of my thumb.
Next it was bilateral twisted tibia syndrome; I really wish I hadn’t mentioned it. As if the woman wasn’t finding me fascinating enough she was now very interested in me, of course she had never heard of it, so again I explained all my bony oddities and at the end of all this she said ‘can I have a look?’, I moved my thumb in her direction and then realised that she meant the legs.
I did end up getting my thumb steri-stripped back together, and was on my way out when she bumped into another nurse and said ‘bilateral twisted tibia syndrome, you ever heard of it?’ alas I had to explain again.
I seem to have the very strange ability of surprising medical professionals of late, also on Wednesday at a routine check up which was nothing to do with my glaucoma I surprised my GP by informing her that I can monitor my own eye pressure and tell if it is dangerously high by a mixture of symptoms and by the feel of my eye ball. She thought that for someone with my type of glaucoma this was pretty amazing, I don’t really get what’s so special about it, but I suppose it is something I live with so I am very used to.
Then before Christmas I got some very shocking news from the optician, witch quite frankly shocked us both I think. My right eye has improved! For ages I have been going to hospital appointments and telling my consultant that I am really concerned that my right eye, which is the most useless to be quite frank, was getting worse it turns out rather ironically that the reason I cant see is because it has improved!
Perhaps I should change career path and look in to becoming a doctor.
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Comments
I did my best to answer all these questions despite the blood pouring out of my thumb.
Hehe. Oh dear... I can relate to medical types always being interested in the things that you're NOT there to see them for. When I fell out of my wheelchair and got concussion, the doctor was far more interested in why I was using the chair than whether I might have a serious head injury. It can be very irritating. It is my ambition to be able to talk disability rights at doctors without anxiety, in the hope that one day they will take the hint that I am usually NOT asking for a cure for my (incurable genetic) condition :D Hope your thumb's getting better!
Once, while on the bed, I was interrogated about my impairment... by a Blood Service nurse. That's right, I was giving blood. So I couldn't make her go away, and she didn't get the hint that I wasn't interested in talking about it. Argh!
Don't get me started on blood donation, on the whole they try really hard to be accessable but fail in some places, and the quizzing i get from them takes hours!