If I die tonight...

I want someone to sue the ass off the Stanford Neuroscience Clinic, which is fucking incapable of getting a doctor (or even a competent nurse) to answer the question: are these side effects (in this case, coughing dark blood and sleeping sixteen out of twenty four hours) serious?


I take this back. The nice admin just called and she is going to text message *my* doctor with my symptoms, and have her call me back. The rest of it still stands, though:

Oh, and for good measure you might want to throw in the resident on call, who loudly proclaims he is a NEUROSURGERY resident and not only refuses to even begin answering my question -- maybe he can't, who knows -- but angrily demands "how did you get this number?" when I start talking. Because the Neuroscience Clinic (remember them? you work for them) GAVE it to me, idiot. (Not that I called him an idiot on the phone -- I have better standards of behavior that I've set for myself than that.) I guess being actually pleasant -- or at least civil -- to patients is outside your required skill set so you never bothered to learn to do it.

Update...

My nice neurologist called. The sleeping 16 out of 24 hours? Topamax. Coughing up blood? Not Topamax.

So I called my primary care physician and talked to to the triage nurse who told me that I shouldn't panic, but she definitely wanted me seen -- nothing was available today, but she'd work me in for tomorrow. If I cough up more blood, develop pain or difficulty breathing, I'm to go to the E.R. She also said there was no way to know just on what I said whether the blood came from the lungs or the esophagus.

So I guess I need to put that Satine outfit back in the closet.