October 01, 2025

I Blame Her a Little Bit and Also I Blame Myself

Blame is not really the way to go I guess but late morning Monday after I saw the CRNP at my PCP’s office, one of my best friends who is a PA asked me to describe my symptoms to her and I explained the back pain and the pain up under my left side and she said right away that the CRNP should have gotten a urine, maybe it’s the kidneys. The CRNP ordered the Lyme’s test that I requested because of what’s been going on with our dog and my husband and weird symptoms and wanting to rule out Lyme’s and potentially other tick born illnesses. But she said if it was anything other than Lyme’s I would be too sick to be in her office. She didn’t order the infection/inflammation marker panels because I went on the steroid Friday from the urgent care provider.

Having gone through everything I have gone through as my mom’s hospital advocate I should have remembered that the steroids mess up the bloodwork, sometimes falsely raising WBC count or raising it higher than it would be. And then the CRNP informed me that it would be a month before the steroids being in there wouldn’t affect the infection markers.

She had a student there and kept repeating the phrase “common things happen commonly” as I expressed that I have no idea what’s going on with me and wondered about Mono or Meningitis which I learned does not have the potential to be airborne from the college students in my office. She told me to finish the steroid and to get the limited bloodwork she sent to the lab and she did not add a urine.

I did message her and ask her for one and she added the urine, but I had already been to the lab Monday and didn’t message her until late Monday or early Tuesday and didn’t go get it until this morning with my other lab orders after I saw the third provider last evening.

More on that tomorrow. It really is tough to know which place to seek medical attention on our community first when it comes to certain symptoms. On one hand I am thankful we have an Urgent Care so when it’s bad but it’s not feeling emergent and the PCP has no appointments available there’s a place to go, but they seem to not want to order bloodwork or scans because they don’t want to be following up with you. And then your PCP has helper providers that don’t always know you and honestly you don’t see your PCP enough for them to know you either. And they don’t seem to want to jump to getting bloodwork or tests to find things out either.

Very thankful for provider number 3 who I sought out at our local orthopedic urgent care and she was very attentive and ordered many things that have brought the diagnostic process along a bit. More tomorrow.