Aspirus yet again

The Relay has nearly a hundred employees of my company participating in one capacity or another. Indeed, my company is a corporate sponsor of the local relay. The cause will not suffer from my failure to participate in future years.

I’m the only person at my company that I know of (at this point) who is involved with Gift of Life. I’d like to change that, as I get more involved myself. It would be nice to have a team from my company participate in next years Dash for Organ Donor Awareness. That’s my long-term goal, anyhow.

I’m told I can expect a short day today, and an even shorter day at work tomorrow. I’ve been trying for over a month to get to my doctor to sign some release forms, but each time I arranged to do it something got in the way. I need to get some of my last year’s test results forwarded to yet another new doctor. With luck, today is my lucky day to arrange for this.

I have been having what is commonly referred to in polite company “woman problems”. In fact, I’ve been having them virtually non-stop since April (I’ve gotten a cumulative of about ten days off for good behavior). Indeed, I haven’t seen normal since months before I was diagnosed with end-stage liver failure.

Before getting the new liver, this was to be expected. Your liver does a lot of stuff, including converting hormones to forms your body can use. No liver, no sex hormones. So a year ago I was in the exact opposite position I find myself in today.

It was also to be expected that I’d have some weirdness shortly after the transplant, while my body adjusted to being normal again. But the weirdness has gone on too long, and become too weird, so I now must add a new doctor to my growing list of regular visits. Lets see … this year it will be: Transplant doctors (note the use of the pleural), cardiologist, hepatologist, oncologist, dentist, neurologist, family doctor and NOW gynecologist. (I’m not counting the occupational health doctor at work, because I don’t think my back-to-work checkup should really count). I was really hoping to put off this visit until I could drop a couple of the other doctors, but things have gotten to the point where I really shouldn’t procrastinate any longer.

The worst part about going to a new doctor is having to provide my medical history. The story of my last seven years or so can take up to an hour of form completion to adequately cover. Hell, the medications alone can take five or ten minutes to list out. The office staff usually looks askance when I ask for a second sheet of paper, and starts asking me for a copy of my living will by the time they’ve half read the history. It makes it hard to convince people that I’m healthy.

Really, I’m healthy. I’ve come back nicely over the past year. I need to build up a bit of muscle yet, and I could take some of the weight off that so obligingly returned over the past six months. But that’s identical to at least 75% of others my age.

This “aspirus” thing is getting very strange. A user or users on Northern Net Exposure (nnex), Level3 Communications, Qwest Communications, Charter Communications, Datawave Technologies and UUNET Technologies (who ever they are) has joined the web search with MarketProbe in making inquiries on the word through multiple search engines, always ending up on my virtual doorstep. Over 5% of my hits since June 22nd are because of a word I made up.

Interestingly enough, the Community Health Center of Wausau changes its name to Aspirus on the first of July. “Aspirus” also appears to be somebody’s name in a role-playing game somewhere out in cyberland. I have no idea what the Aspirus frenzy is about, and I suspect I’ll never know. I remain intrigued though.