Hit by lightning. Again. I feel like the frail off-screen distant relative of some major TV character. You know the one. Every weekly episode has a new throw-away one-liner. "You remember Elaine — Maude's uncle's wife's cousin? She just had her gall bladder removed." "She just got hit by a car." "An albatross knocked her over on its yearly migration and broke her arm." "She just died from an infected hangnail." "She just died again when she got hit by a zero-gravity toilet seat that re-entered Earth's gravity after the ISS fell out of orbit." (Sorry, that last one was ripped off from "Dead Like Me," which was a vastly under-rated series if you never got to see it.)
On the plus side, I now know why I lost my original liver eighteen years ago. OK, technically it wasn't lost so much as thrown away. Anyhow. I now know why I've had neuresthesia in my hands and feet for decades. I know why I get ocular migraines now. The reason why I perpetually itch, and why it gets worse after a shower is now explained. I may even finally have an explanation as to the tinnitus and the macular degeneration. It all boils down to a another rare-ish condition called Polycythemia Vera.( Collapse )
I'm still waiting for genetic marker testing to come back, but the disease is usually caused by a gene that zigged when it should have zagged and isn't usually a hereditary condition. It's usually diagnosed in people in their 60's, but frankly I think that's because it's a missed diagnosis until it gets completely out of hand. But I'll skip the editorializing for the moment. The Reader's Digest version is that my marrow has joined the Type-A Overachievers' Club and is overproducing red blood cells and platelets at a rate comparable to that of the conveyer belt in the episode where Lucy and Ethel are working in a chocolate factory.
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Normal human female hematocrit is around 43. Five days ago mine was 62. They did a red blood cell reduction procedure on my yesterday and knocked it down to 51. I'll probably be called back for another reduction procedure early next week.