Some Secondary Health Problems

As if having the COVID virus for a month now isn't enough, I'm also developing various secondary health problems.

First, I developed a sinus infection.  Since I was still struggling with active COVID including fever, I needed to stay in quarantine so that I wouldn't infect my whole primary care practice.  This meant that when I thought I was developing a sinus infection, I had to resort to a televisit meeting with my doctor.  Since I was just video chatting with my doctor this meant that she couldn't examine me for additional problems and only had my descriptive assessment of symptoms to form a diagnosis and prescribe a treatment plan.  

There was no doubt that she was right in that I was suffering from a sinus infection.  That was obvious by the symptoms.  Unfortunately, we are now thinking there were more serious underlying problems as well that had yet to show any symptoms.

I got up yesterday morning at around 5am.  I hardly slept through the night mostly due to being far too cold but I was also quite uncomfortable too.  By 5am, I needed to use the bathroom so I headed to the bathroom.

After peeing and while mildly shaking out the remaining urine, I noticed some very dark stuff dripping onto the side of the white bowl...  I quickly determined it was bright red blood.  I also noticed a bit of pain.  At the time, I was thinking "ugggg...  now I have a urinary tract infection".

At 8am, I called my doctor to make an appointment.  In the meantime, no more blood was seen in subsequent urination.  I still had some mild pain but no more blood.  I still felt I should call the doctor though just to be safe.

Unfortunately, my doctor was booked...  Sheila's doctor who I use as a backup, when necessary, was also booked so I had to see a new doctor.  

Sheila and I headed to the doctor's office (since I am finally out of quarantine) and I provided a urine sample.  The urine shows no sign of infection...  no sign of blood...  no sign of bacteria.  So now we had a little talk about bladder cancer, prostate cancer, or even a more involved strep infection. 

The nurse came back into the room to take some blood...  that didn't work so she went looking for someone with a bit more experience.  Another nurse came in and managed to dig around a bit and found a vein to get the blood.  This has been a new thing for me since, in recent years, I've lost significant muscle tone so now my arms and legs that used to be muscular are now skinnier like toothpicks.  Consequently, the nurses are having a more difficult time finding a vein.  I used to have muscular arms that were about twice the size than they are today and the muscles caused veins to pop out making it very easy to give blood.  That is not the case anymore.  Now they must dig around to find a vein in my toothpick arms.

The bloodwork is to check my white blood counts as related to additional infection and/or cancer.  They are also looking at kidney function and doing a PSA test to check for prostate cancer.  So, now I'm waiting on results related to some more serious problems.

There is one more possibility that may have caused some bleeding...  I could have passed a tiny but sharp edged kidney stone.  If that is the case, then I don't think anything of importance will show up in tests.  We do need to rule out a few cancers and more serious infections though so that is what we are waiting on now.  This is also the reason I made an appointment anyway.  I didn't want to ignore any warning signs of more serious illness and then have to face an even more difficult condition later.

In the meantime, my fever is still coming and going and I generally feel rather lousy.

Oh...  and I should mention that the new doctor (new for me) was a good doctor.  He asked questions, he listened, he addressed my questions, and he was quite thorough and even seemed quite concerned.  He even dug deeply into my medical history.  In hindsight, I think he is concerned about the possibility of finding cancer and was also concerned about how we would handle that discussion.  Unfortunately, Sheila and I have decades of experience in discussing cancers, leukemias and incurable chronic and debilitating illnesses so, for us, it was just another doctor visit.  He was a good doctor and someone I would recommend.  And, that is a good thing today because I have also seen far too many really lousy medical professionals (at different practices).

Now we wait for test results...