She had a tumor on the membrane that surrounds the brain. It was taken out surgically. Initially they were going to do it really minimally but they found it was grown into her skull and had to cut it out and giver her a metal plate. Later some came back and they did this thing called a gamma knife because the physical surgery had resulted in bleeding in the head. Its an acceptable amount so they have not gone back in. We have learned a lot about acceptable amounts of things. She has allergies and is trying shots after years of using over the counters. She has had trouble sleeping and some studies shows she stopped breathing at night but it was close to the cutoff for acceptable amount (eyup). She had a procedure to make more space in her nasal cavity but she had complications and went to the emergency room. She now has a cpap now and according to it she now just has a couple of stop breathing occurences in the night. Im likely forgetting things and there are others that we have not tackled. You see me mentioning holding off and that is because we have to make decisions about what is most important to tackle. Its a fact of life for us. She has neurapathy and goes regularly to a chiro that helps with that and some of her other things. Insurance does not cover PRP but it works for her so we pay for that out of pocket mostly for her knee which I mentioned the surgery did not bring her back to normal on. Ironically we pay to prevent the insurance from having to pay for a far more expensive surgery. They will cover injecting other things into the knee but only if a drug company makes it. My wife can function for a limited time span. She has to stay in bed and she can be out for an hour if she gets back and no issues. two hours and she sorta has to recover. More hours and the recovery will take longer and if she pushes herself to hard (which I continually try to get her not to do but she can be stubborn) it will be days. Outside of laying down she can’t do anything else for two long. sit to long, stand to long, walk to long. When she is up she needs to keep her activity varied. Our vehicle we have bought because of how well it works for her sitting (she can sit in some chairs longer than others and she can stand longer if she has a pad and such) and for her to get into and out of the vehicle. Its a dodge grand caravan and unfortunately dodge has replaced it with the pacifica and those chairs are not as good so we have yet to locate an eventual new best option. If we do a surgery she will be much worse and I will have to care for her more but at the same time my time off is limited and I can’t lose my job/insurance.
Ok sorta a final thing but again you see our hold off thing. TV shows love to display this fantasy in medicine were the doctors realize all these things have an underlying issue that they nerd out on an investigate the mystery and find it and solve it and now the patient is ok. Nothing could be further from the truth. The insurance companies will only compensate for specific things and they can only spend a limited amout of time on it. This means that every symptom basically has to be dealt with separately and any type of holistic care is out the window. This is why we have to decide at each point in time what to tackle. My wife spends most of her time trying to figure out what to do given the system we are in. I spend a fair amount helping her when needed but much more often than that dealing with the finances around the healthcare. We sorta split dealing with authorizations and denails and such. She was suffocating in her sleep and the cpap seems to have alleviated that so she is getting her uterus biopsy and once that is dealt with we will likely go back to. back or hip. back or hip. Meanwhile btw I am aging and I try my best not to neglect my health but its not easy to do what im supposed to do. Im not blowing it off but I know I don’t do it was well as I should and I know we are absolutely screwed if I go down.
This is the reality of the us healthcare system.
