Health News

Just to rip the band-aid off, On Friday, May 23rd, I received some concerning medical news about my lungs. A followup CT scan confirmed a tumor. It’s bad, but I don’t yet know exactly how bad it is. To my untrained ear, it sounds pretty frickin’ bad, but I’m trying to remain optimistic while simultaneously preparing for worst-case scenarios.

Here’s what happened.

I mentioned last time and maybe the time before that I’d been coughing a lot and saw an ENT for acid reflux. I think that was part of it, but not the whole story.

By coincidence, I had my yearly physical with my primary care doctor on Thursday the 22nd and brought up the coughing I’ve been experiencing and he recommended I get a chest x-ray, just in case, which was exactly what I wanted him to say. He agreed with the ENT that it could be acid reflux, and he listened to my lungs but didn’t hear anything out of the ordinary.

In olden times, getting an x-ray meant walking into the next room for a few minutes, but now, of course, with all of our modern advances in American healthcare, it means going to the hospital for a walk-in appointment, signing in on a touch-screen kiosk, and waiting hours for your name to be called while listening to everybody else yelling at the people behind the reception desk. Those staff are truly heroic figures for being on the front lines of customer service where people are at their worst.

Anyway, after paying $500 out-of-pocket (it was 20% off on sale!) and moving to a second waiting room, I finally got the x-ray. The actual x-ray process took a maximum of 10 minutes after two hours of waiting. They took one front x-ray and one side x-ray. I asked for a copy of them on a CDROM, and they all sounded shocked and amazed that I asked for “the disc.” I mean, I just paid $500 for it, why wouldn’t I want a copy of the pictures?

The next day, on the 23rd, I got a call from my doctor saying, “Um there’s a problem with your right lung. You need to get a CT scan and you need to see a pulmonologist.” I’ll spare you the exact description of what they saw on the x-ray because it sounds super scary. Way, way worse than the worst-case scenario I had imagined, which was something like pneumonia or bronchitis.

After digging up my USB CDROM drive and the right software, I was able to view the x-ray images on the disc myself, and yeah, there’s definitely something there, and I can definitely tell it’s my body because of the distinctive kink in my upper spine that has caused me so many aches and pains the last couple decades.

So, you know, interesting times. Time to break out the dry humor as a defense mechanism and downplay the existential terror I feel at starting down roughly the same (terminal) path that my mother did in 1991. I’ve always suspected that my relatively good luck with health would disappear one day all at once, and here we are.

In life, it often seems like multiple problems materialize at the same time, rather than having to face them one at a time. Funny how that is. I also have a cataract in my left eye and I can barely read anymore. I was going to try to get it removed this summer but that just got moved to the back burner. Not to mention some car troubles and some desperately overdue home repairs.

I called a phone number I was given and scheduled a CT scan, but American healthcare means that June 5, some two weeks away, was the very first available appointment. What was I supposed to do for two weeks? Hurry up and wait, that’s what. And try to remain upbeat that it won’t actually be a worst-case scenario.

Meanwhile, the only real symptoms I’m experiencing are a crushing headache every day and shortness of breath when I do any kind of physical activity, along with occasional coughing and wheezing, usually at night, and often when I talk.

The coughing is actually better now than it was about a month and a half ago when it got bad enough for me to call the ENT, thinking I had bad acid reflux. Back then, I would wake up in the morning and cough so much I almost felt like I’d pass out, especially during or after eating breakfast, or if/when I tried to talk in the morning. Now, it’s just a minor dry cough, exacerbated by talking and eating, which is roughly what I’ve experienced for many years, even before COVID.

The worst part now, by far, is the nearly continuous headache that has come on in the last month. (It’s been better the last couple of days though, so there’s some good news at least.) I thought it might have been a side effect of the new meds the ENT prescribed, but I’ve stopped taking both of them and seen no improvement in the headaches. So my suspicion is that it’s a reduction in oxygen because of reduced lung function, or stress, or both.

Then I received a call from my doctor on a Sunday saying he’d seen my June 5 CT appointment and he wanted me to get the CT scan a lot sooner than two weeks and would update his order to “stat” instead of “routine” and I should try to call the number again on Memorial Day to reschedule it sooner. That sounds … kind of serious. If it didn’t sound serious before, it definitely does now. Dude, I’m trying to stay positive, here! It doesn’t help when your doctor sounds nervous and calls on a Sunday.

I called the scheduling number on Memorial Day and, surprise surprise, they weren’t open on Memorial Day. The next day, I was lucky enough to re-schedule a new appointment for the following day, Wednesday afternoon on the 28th… but I had to drive much further to get it.

So I drove 25 minutes away to an emergency room in the correct hospital network and got the CT scan. (An adventure in and of itself, because I thought my car might breakdown on the way there.) A “contrasting CT scan” to be specific. That’s the kind where they give you an IV of some kind of contrasting dye so the blood vessels show up better on the scan. The dye gives you a weird feeling of internal heat, and that’s when I learned how fast blood circulates around the human body, something I never realized before. They injected the dye in my arm and I was feeling it in my legs mere seconds later. Weird.

Anyway they did the scans and I returned home. They said it could be 4-5 days before someone reads the results. So I hurry up and wait again, hoping I don’t drop dead in the meantime, trying to figure out how I’m supposed to proceed with normal daily life with this Sword of Damocles hanging over my head.

About noon on Friday, the 30th, I received a call from my doctor saying that he had called “them” three times trying to get them to read the CT scan sooner. (A primary care doctor, I’ve learned, is not much higher than a patient on the hierarchy of importance in the healthcare system.) A few hours later I saw the results of the CT scan in my online medical portal, and lets just say it’s a lot more scary-sounding words. The chest x-ray was definitely not a false positive, and it sounds like it’s a bit beyond the “we caught it early and it’s no big deal” stage.

Again, I don’t know how bad it is. I’m just speculating. But I’m almost surely hospital-bound at some point in my future.

So not to sound too morbid, but if I don’t ever post again after this, you’ll know why. That sounds like an overreaction when I read that back, but I’ve never dealt with anything this potentially serious before. As you can imagine, it’s fairly overwhelming. I wasn’t prepared for this, but then, who is?

I started posting vlogs on my real-name YouTube channel. If you happen to be a family member or know who I am, just search for my name on YouTube (use “thomas” instead of “tom”) and you’ll get more timely updates. It’s a lot easier than trying to write it down.

Most of the rest of this post was written before May 23rd, and, frankly, none of it really matters to me anymore.

Gaming

The new gaming PC continues to work well. Not much else to say about it. Gaming PCs either work or they don’t work, and that’s the extent of the conversation. The next time you think about it is when you run out of room for installing games. I haven’t completed installing stuff on the new PC or rearranging my living room area, so there’s just a bunch of computers and tables strewn around with wires between them.

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33

What a roller coaster of emotions this game is. One day, I love it. The next day, I absolutely hate it with a burning passion and fully rage quit playing. I see all the positive reviews, and there’s only one universal comment that I wholeheartedly agree with: The music is amazing.

The story? I’m still in Act 2 so my views might change, but I felt like the quality plummeted in Act 2, and it went into plotlines and characters that I couldn’t care less about, not to mention changing the goalposts of the actual gameplay. Honestly I feel like they must have inserted Act 2 to artificially stretch out the game.

Everything about the combat system is completely undermined by one design decision: Almost every attack animation is designed to be a huge slap in the face to the player. A big Nelson-from-The-Simpsons HA-HA! moment. I’ve never seen such trolling from attack animations before. The number of fake-outs and feints they throw at you to get you to dodge at the wrong time is comically over-the-top. It’s impossible for me to feel any respect for it.

I simply can’t understand how modern game designers can’t tell the difference between fun, satisfying tough-but-fair gameplay and maddening, repetitive, time-wasting tough-but-unfair gameplay.

I’ve also never seen a video game where all three