Thursday 29 March 2012

Mystery Disease Investigation: Rheumatology

Rheumatology Outpatients 

I had my first (well, this is now my second round) outpatient appointment today at the rheumatology clinic. My consultant was great and has really put my mind to ease, we looked at all of my blood work and I had an examination as well (joint and muscle function). Basically his conclusion is that my blood work has not changed in the last two years (this is good news) and that my joint and muscle pain is actually due to hyper-mobility (double jointedness). He wants to run a couple of other specific tests just so that he can be 100% certain that I'm cleared with them.

Hyper-mobility

To treat the hyper-mobility I'm going to need to go through some extensive physiotherapy to get the ligaments and the surrounding muscle nice and strong again to support the joints. However, I can't have any PT done until the clot in my leg has cleared up: bummer, guess I'll have to wait a while on that one.
One thing that he did mention though was that I had a mutation on one of my chromosomes and had some indications of Factor Five Lipids (no idea what that is all about!) but basically it makes me super prone to clotting. He couldn't really go into much more details as it wasn't his speciality but that's exactly what hematology are for.

Back to Marathon Training?

So the good news is that I can almost cross rheumatology of my list of suspects and that also gives me the opportunity to start running again once I'm back up to that standard of health and fitness. I suspect I'll need to go through a lot of rehab, training, and weight loss again before I get back to my marathon days (sighs and goes off into a day dream ...). I mean I can barely walk at the moment and have put on about 40lbs - that is not good and needs to go now!

Update:

Rheumatology has now been crossed off as all my blood work came back within normal ranges for their tests. Yay!!

Morphine Withdrawal

On a side note has anyone ever gone through morphine withdrawal? I switched from morphine to tramadol a couple of days ago and I just cannot sleep and have these nasty headaches. Let me know if you have any tips for getting through this.

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