Braaaaiiiiins
Posted in Life on 11/10/2006 08:55 pm by enjanerdI had an appointment with a neurologist today to further investigate my excessive daytime drowsiness. I know there are a lot of wacky disorders out there and drowsiness is probably a common symptom of everything that could be wrong with you, so you have to start somewhere, but parts of the exam were weird. Not like, inappropriate weird, but “what kind of disease would I be suffering from” weird.
He had this doohickey. It was like a metal rod that was pronged on one end and cylindrical at the tips. I had been looking at it earlier before he came into the examining room, wondering what it was for. So he took this, pulled up my pant legs, and put the metal thing on my shin. “Does this feel warm or cold?” Well, seeing as the room was cold and I was wearing my coat until you made me take it off, of course it’s cold!
Then he asked me if I was scared of him because I was giving him a funny look. No, that wasn’t a look of fear. It was a look of perplexity. Why have a fancy metal thing to ask me if it’s cold, when you could just as easily have used the fancy not-mallet thing you used to test my reflexes? It looked like a meat thermometer the length of my arm.
He also did the same thing my primary care physician did: had me hold my arms out in front of me and close my eyes. I think they do that to see what you’d look like as a sleep-walking zombie.
He had me look at his nose while he held his hands to the side and had me identify which finger he was wiggling. It was kind of cheating though because as soon as I’d point to one side, he’d switch to the other side. So, I couldn’t actually catch the finger that was wiggling, but I also knew that he was just switching back and forth, so i didn’t really need to see.
Anyway, it was all very exciting. He gave me some samples of the new drug my primary care physician tried prescribing it for me! My insurance wouldn’t pay for it, and I was unwilling to pay for it out of pocket. He thought that was the medication I should be on too. I came home looking like I went trick-or-treating at a drug store. Woo!