Welcome back to my medical blog. This certainly is not the direction I envisaged Berlinfusion going when I started it nearly a year ago!
I must admit to being thoroughly fed up with all this. Going to a medical professional for one complaint, having them dismiss that issue then sending me for "standard" investigations which throw up other, potentially major, problems that I was totally unaware of.
I had another one yesterday. At the dentist.
Over Christmas I had a possible abscess which was very painful. I couldn't get to a doctor or dentist due to it being the holidays. As I had some antibiotics here, I self-treated (no, I know you shouldn't do this, but it worked.) While the big pain has gone, I am aware I have residual gum problems.
As soon as I could, I made an appointment with the dentist but had to cancel it when Rhiannon was ill. Yesterday was the rescheduled day.
I explained my problem - and the fact that it had now gone meant I expected no treatment, but was scheduled for a clean anyway.
Didn't get a clean. I got yet another x-ray instead. I thought there was a limit to how many of these a body should have?
And then was told I have a big infection in my jawbone on the opposite side from where my original problem was. Needless to say I have no symptoms of this either. Now I have to make an appointment with a surgical dentist who apparently will drill through my jaw and do other revolting procedures.
I don't want to do that. Not quite sure what to do, really; I have no pain there at all but will if I make this appointment.
I'm trying very hard not to swear on this blog... and I have another appointment to make elsewhere. Perhaps understandably, I do not want to schedule any more.
Anyway, I got to thinking: how much radiation have I been exposed to in recent weeks?
Whilst in Tokyo after the Tohoku earthquake of March 11th 2011 and the subsequent Fukushima nuclear crisis, radiation measuring was the main topic of conversation. We all learned about measuring biological risk using sieverts, millisieverts and microsieverts: "the millisievert or thousandth of a sievert, indicated as mSv; and the microsievert or millionth of a sievert, indicated as µSv."
As life was very stressful at that time, many of us were delighted to discover this Radiation Dose Chart (also pictured below - please do note the comments regarding cell phone usage!) which compared various outputs... including the now legendary radiation dose of eating a banana (0.1. µSv if you're interested).
So I started to add it all up.
- 1 dental x-ray, 3 chest x-rays, 2 spine x-rays, 1 CT scan, a return plane flight to London... and that's just in the past fortnight! I'm still not sure what I had to drink or what I was injected with for the CT scan but I'm sure it wasn't particularly good for me.
After a while I got confused with the milli- and micro- maths.
So I gave up and ate a banana.